J.J. Abrams Responds to Leaked Millennium Falcon Pics with a Wink to Star Wars Nerds

Everyone knows Star Wars: Episode VII director J.J. Abrams likes to keep the details of his movies under wraps. It's all part of his "mystery box" philosophy of storytelling which, in a nutshell, holds that the best way to instill hope and wonder in a moviegoer is tease them with little bits of info while keeping them in the dark for as long as possible. (See Cloverfield, Super 8, Lost, and of course Star Trek: Into Darkness.)

For this reason, it's got to be pretty frustrating for J.J. when somebody leaks a bunch of photos from the set of one of his movies, revealing a pretty huge detail—like this week, when the world learned that they're building a Millennium Falcon for Star Wars: Episode VII. Sure, he kept his official response to the leak pretty light-hearted:

See? That's one of the hologram chess boards you see in the Falcon in Star Wars: Episode IV, the message being something like, "yeah, no shit the Millennium Falcon is in the movie!"

But you know he actually does wish the photos hadn't gotten out. It's not that he wasn't going to reveal the info to moviegoers eventually. We weren't all going to show up at midnight screenings of Episode VII in a couple of years and be like, whoa it's the Millennium Falcon! It's just that Abrams's entire schtick is revealing every piece of information precisely at precisely the right time. And if he wasn't the one who leaked the photos, then it wasn't the right time.

Of course, if he was one who leaked the photos...well, that's genius.