Well, things haven't started out so well on principal photography on the set of Episode VII. The photo above is obviously from ROTJ, when they actually made it through without injuring anyone terribly. If you haven't heard, Harrison Ford has apparently been fairly badly injured on set. The exact details are unclear, but based on what's been going around so far he has a broken ankle from a hydraulic door that fell on him (some reports say it was the door of the Falcon, others say it was just some door on set) and it will require surgery and 6-8 weeks of recovery and therefore not shooting.
While this news is bad, we can only hope that it is not terrible and more of a pain and a delay than anything tragic. First of all, let's be glad it didn't land on the man's head. I suppose we can also sort of be glad that if the cause of the injury is true, then it means that we can't really blame it on him being old and not able to do the same things he used to do, because if something falls on you, I don't care how old you are, you're probably going to break a bone. The news is still fairly vague but they are telling us that it will require schedule juggling and moving a lot of things around, but filming should still be completed on schedule. I only hope this doesn't shrink his role or severely limit him even when he does come back. As you can imagine, with an unsafe set the rest of the cast is not happy, and I'd imagine he won't be thrilled when he comes back either. It will be interesting once we get the real story.
It's slightly more concerning that he has been in the hospital since it happened on Friday. There were other reports floating around about a pelvis injury but that has been denied. Time will tell. I feel bad for the guy but this is far from the first time he has had something bad happen on set. He wrecked one knee on Raiders, he destroyed his back on Temple of Doom, he wrecked his other knee on The Fugitive. I know on ToD he was off set for many weeks and had surgery and came back, so we know that they can make things work even when he's the star of the film and in every scene, let alone when they can adjust the schedule and probably shoot plenty of scenes without him. Then again, he was 30 years younger working on that movie, but let's not think about that.
So, unfortunate news for sure, but hopefully not devastating. If we find out that the schedule was merely rearranged and we won't notice a difference when the movie comes out, I'll be happy. I just hope it doesn't change anything. And again, I do feel bad for him since nothing like that should be happening on a set!
