The ninth film in the original Star Wars saga will be called The Rise of Skywalker, and will feature the return of the evil emperor Palpatine to threaten the young heroine Rey and the Resistance.
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Walt Disney Co on Friday showed fans attending the Star Wars Celebration convention in Chicago the first footage from the movie, which will be released in theatres in December and will conclude the story that began in 1977.
A villainous cackle was heard at the end of the trailer, and the actor who played Palpatine in previous films, Ian McDiarmid, walked onstage to loud applause from an audience of roughly 10,000 fans, many waving colourful light-sabres.
The Rise of Skywalker trailer has been viewed online about 11 million times.
Director JJ Abrams, speaking alongside a handful of cast members, said the movie takes place some time after the events of the 2017 film The Last Jedi.
The footage showed a hug between Princess Leia, played by the late Carrie Fisher, and Rey (Daisy Ridley).
Fisher died in 2016, but Abrams said that in a "weird miracle," he was able to piece together unused footage from Last Jedi to continue the beloved character's story.
"Princess Leia lives in this film in a way that's mind-blowing for me," he said.
The director disclosed little about the plot, however.
"This movie is about this new generation, what they've inherited, the light and the dark, and are they ready?" he told the crowd.
Abrams said writers met with Star Wars creator George Lucas before they started to script the final chapter in one of the world's most-celebrated movie franchises.
The goal was "to create something that gives a sense of surprise and thrill and heartbreak, and shock and awe, but also feeling like an inevitability," he said.
The circumstances surrounding Palpatine's return remain a mystery. The character appeared to die in 1983's Return of the Jedi.
In the trailer released on Friday, the voice of Luke (Mark Hamill) says to Rey that "no one's ever really gone."
Luke also tells Rey that "we have passed on all the knowledge," and that the fight against evil is now hers.
Ridley, John Boyega, who plays Resistance fighter Finn and Oscar Isaac, who portrays pilot Poe Dameron, all attended the event.
Australian Associated Press
