‘Ralph Breaks the Internet’ Had to Cut Kylo Ren Joke

The upcoming Disney animated feature Ralph Breaks the Internet is filled with all kinds of Easter eggs and references about pop culture — especially other Disney properties — but one joke in particular was deemed unacceptable by the powers that be. Apparently, it’s not cool to make fun of Star Wars villain Kylo Ren.

“At one point, we had a joke about Kylo Ren being kind of a spoiled child,” director Rich Moore told IGN in a recent interview. “We went to Lucasfilm and said, ‘Here’s what we’re doing.’ And they said, ‘Well, we’d prefer you don’t show him as a spoiled child. You know, he is our villain, and we’d prefer you don’t do that.’ So we were respectful of that.”

While last year’s Star Wars: The Last Jedi cemented Kylo Ren’s journey to the dark side (literally) after he slew his mentor and took control of the First Order himself, it was also a movie that arguably cemented that the character is very much a child — or, at least, treated as one by almost everyone around him, including writer-director Rian Johnson, who said in an interview about the pic that the character was “in the turmoil of adolescence and figuring out who he’s going to be as a man.”

Perhaps Lucasfilm’s preference to protect Kylo Ren from parody is an attempt to signal that, as he moves into the final movie in the current trilogy, 2019’s Episode IX, he’s growing up a bit — or maybe it’s simply an attempt to avoid yet another destructive temper tantrum.