Funny Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker Fan Poster Puts the Emperor in the Spotlight

Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker has been in theaters nearly a week and that means fans have had plenty of time to process every detail of the epic film as well as come up with some pretty great memes and fan art as well. Some of that fan art includes an incredible and hilarious reimagining of The Rise of Skywalker poster that puts Emperor Palpatine not just front and center, but frankly all over — and it’s so good you have to see it for yourself.

Just a quick warning, there may be spoilers for Star Wars: The Rise of Skwywalker below. You’ve been warned!

Shared over on the r/PrequelMemes sub on Reddit, u/VollToast shared a fan art version of the Rise of Skywalker that literally reimagined every single character on the poster — save for maybe the droids and Chewbacca — as Emperor Palpatine but not just any version of the baddie. No, this poster imagined him not as Darth Sidious but as the younger version of himself we saw in the prequels. The poster itself got a bit of a name change as well, becoming Star Wars The Rise of the Senate. Check it out below.

While this poster definitely focuses on the younger Palpatine as he rose to power, given what we now know about Palpatine’s power and reach through the franchise seeing the character as literally every character on The Rise of Skywalker poster is oddly on the nose. As fans who have seen the film know (and even those who have opted to read spoilers, you know who you are), Palpatine was playing a very long game and was secretly pulling the strings in all three of the “new” trilogy. It’s revealed in Rise of Skywalker that Palpatine created Snoke, and there is even a jar of Snoke parts on Exegol and has been manipulating Kylo Ren this whole time. His end goal? Get his granddaughter, who turned to be Rey, to strike him down in anger, thus turning to the Dark Side herself and allowing him along with the spirits of all the other Sith to inhabit her as she rules the Final Order as Empress.

It’s an interesting plot element, but it also leaves room for a lot of questions. Filmmaker J.J. Abrams recently appeared on the podcast Popcorn With Peter Travers to discuss his ending of the saga, revealing that he wanted to leave some mysteries open to the audience for interpretation.

“We knew going in that we had to make this feel conclusive. It had to come to an end,” Abrams explained. “And yet, there are certain things that I feel… here’s the way I feel about Star Wars. It’s the reason that I loved the original trilogy so much — and the reason I loved the original trilogy more than the prequel trilogy, for me — which was that the original trilogy posed great questions and allowed you to infer the answer. It allowed you to do the math on your own.”

Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker is now playing in theaters.