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John Boyega’s Lost ‘Star Wars’ Script Wound Up On EBay. Here’s A Roundup Of Other Leaked Hollywood Scripts.

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Topline: British actor John Boyega admitted on Wednesday that a lost script for the new Star Wars movie that showed up on eBay was in fact his and that he’d left it under his bed while moving apartments—and it’s not the first time a script from a major franchise has leaked.

  • Boyega, who plays Finn in the new Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker movie, first told Good Morning America that “it was me”—just two days after director J.J. Abrams first described how a script that had shown up on eBay was retrieved by a Disney employee before it got published.
  • “I was moving apartments, and I left the script under my bed,” Boyega said, before describing how a cleaner, who “didn’t know the true value,” found the script a few weeks later and put it on eBay for just $84.
  • Closely guarded scripts from other big franchises have been leaked before: Game of Thrones, for instance, experienced multiple leaks over the course of the eight-season television show.
  • In 2014, famed director Quentin Tarantino sued Gawker Media for allegedly printing and publicizing a leaked copy of his script for The Hateful Eight.
  • In 2013, Wikileaks published a leaked script for The Fifth Estate, a movie about Julian Assange, as well as its own scathing 4,000-word review of the movie, calling it “bad” and factually inaccurate.
  • Even a script for The Joker, which has become the highest-grossing R-rated film of all time, leaked earlier this year before the movie’s release, giving fans an early look at what would be the most controversial comic book movie ever.

Key background: Scripts for big franchises like the Star Wars movies are among the most closely guarded in the world, with many actors only getting parts of the script in which they have their specific scenes. Boyega said even he didn’t know the ending to the much-anticipated movie, which will conclude the Star Wars saga, which debuted in 1977.

As Boyega, who plays a Stormtrooper turned resistance fighter, described in his interview, he did get into hot water over the situation—someone from Disney had to step in and get the script removed from eBay. “It was scary. I got calls from every official,” he said, before joking that “even Mickey Mouse called me: ‘What did you do?!’”

What to watch for: Disney’s The Rise of Skywalker opens worldwide on December 18 and could make hundreds of millions of dollars at the North American box office in its opening weekend.

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