Warning. Major spoilers for Rogue One: A Star Wars Story follow. You have been warned…
Those of us who’ve ventured to the cinema to see Rogue One: A Star Wars Story will likely have noticed that much of the footage seen in the trailers was absent from the final movie. We already know that the extensive reshoots changed much of the film, including the ending (a lot of the marketing material saw Jyn running around on the beaches of Scarif with the Death Star plans in hand, for instance), and while it’s unlikely that we’ll ever find out exactly what the original plans were pre-reshoots, director Gareth Edwards has revealed that in the initial draft of the screenplay the Rebel heroes survived the climactic battle with the Empire.
“The very first version, they didn’t [die], in the screenplay,” Edwards told Empire (via io9). “And it was just assumed by us that we couldn’t do that. ‘They’re not going to let us do that.’ So I was trying to figure out how this ends where that doesn’t happen. And then everyone read that and there was this feeling of like, ‘They’ve got to die, right?’ And everyone was like, ‘Yeah, can we?’ We thought we weren’t going to be allowed to but Kathy [Kennedy, President of Lucasfilm] and everyone at Disney were like ‘Yeah it makes sense/ I guess they have to because they’re not in A New Hope.’ And so from that point on we had the license. I kept waiting for someone to go, ‘You know what? Could we just film an extra scene where we see Jyn and Cassian, they’re okay and they’re on another planet?’ And it never came. No one ever gave us that note, so we got to do it.”
SEE ALSO: Gareth Edwards on incorporating unused footage from A New Hope into Rogue One: A Star Wars Story
Are you glad that Lucasfilm gave Edwards license to kill off the heroes, or would you have liked to see some of them making it out alive? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below…
From Lucasfilm comes the first of the Star Wars standalone films, Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, an all-new epic adventure. In a time of conflict, a group of unlikely heroes band together on a mission to steal the plans to the Death Star, the Empire’s ultimate weapon of destruction. This key event in the Star Wars timeline brings together ordinary people who choose to do extraordinary things, and in doing so, become part of something greater than themselves.
Rogue One: A Star Wars Story sees Gareth Edwards (Godzilla) directing a cast that includes Felicity Jones (The Theory of Everything), Diego Luna (Milk), Ben Mendelsohn (The Dark Knight Rises), Donnie Yen (Ip Man), Jiang Wen (Let the Bullets Fly), Forest Whitaker (The Last King of Scotland), Alan Tudyk (Con Man), Riz Ahmed (Nightcrawler), Genevieve O’Reilly (Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the Sith), Jimmy Smits (Star Wars: Episode II – Attack of the Clones), James Earl Jones (Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope), Valene Kane (The Fall), Alistair Petrie (The Night Manager), Warwick Davis (Star Wars: Episode IV – Return of the Jedi), Ian McElhinney (Game of Thrones) and Jonathan Aris (Sherlock).
Originally published December 20, 2016. Updated April 16, 2018.
