Rogue One: A Star Wars Story had a few options when it came to titles and now those alternative options have been revealed.
Naming a film sounds easy but it’s an important task and can negatively impact a film’s marketing and box office performance as a result.
Rogue One: A Star Wars Story landed on a pretty cool name in the end but there were other options being considered. Participating in IGN’s WFH Theater, writers Chris Weitz and Gary Whitta spilled the beans. Weitz said:
“There was one point at which we were kicking around titles for this, right? Rogue One was a good choice eventually, but one of them was Dark Times. This choice would have been a reference to Obi-Wan Kenobi’s speech in A New Hope where he says to Luke ‘Before the dark times, before The Empire.'”
Whitta added: “We had a lot. At one point, John Swartz, who was one of the creative executives on the film had a list and we all kind of voted on the ones that we liked….One of the things that occurred to me, I went back and looked to all the previous films, and this continues to be true even with the sequel trilogy now being completed, the titles of Star Wars Saga films are always either three words or four words long. They just all are. So it occurred to me that one of the ways we could differentiate this movie from the rest is we had a title that was only one word or two words long. So like Star Wars: Rebellion, Star Wars: Rogue One, let’s do a title that’s shorter so that even from the title of the movie you know this is something that doesn’t necessarily conform to the unwritten rules of the Saga films.”
Another title Whitta thought of was Shadow of the Death Star.
Eventually, they found out the real title the same time we all did: “They don’t tell you these things either, that’s how I found out. When Bob Iger announced it at a shareholder’s conference I went ‘Oh, that’s my title.’ That’s how I found out.”
SEE ALSO: Star Wars: Jyn Erso’s initial Rogue One origin story was too similar to Rey’s
Rogue One is a pretty cool name but what do you think? Was there a better option out there? Let us know in the comments below and on social media @flickeringmyth…
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 features 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) and Jonathan Aris (Sherlock).
