While there’s certainly a fan base for “Rogue One: A Star Wars Story,” the “Star Wars” spin-off film remains haunted by what could have been rather than what is.
As we know, “Godzilla” helmer Gareth Edwards directed the film which underwent major retooling before release. Tony Gilroy was brought in to re-write and reshoot a good portion of it – mostly to do with the last act. Christopher McQuarrie, Scott Z. Burns and Michael Arndt also did some tinkering with the script.
Now some more behind-the-scenes information has been revealed via the film’s original screenwriters Gary Whitta and Chris Weitz as part of IGN’s Watch From Home Theater series.
Both Whitta and Weitz have talked about the changes made to the film in the past, but they had some new revelations this time out starting with alternate titles they toyed with both “Dark Times” and “Shadow of the Death Star”. Whitta then explained some of their thinking:
“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.”
Whitta confirmed he wrote several possibly opening crawls for the film, crawls which never ended up in the movie. The crawl was sacrificed because they wanted to differentiate themselves:
“One of the things that we arrived at fairly early on in the process is that it was OK to liberate ourselves from the traditional storytelling language of Star Wars.”
Big changes also involved the two lead characters. Numerous possibilities for Felicity Jones’ Jyn Erso existed including that she was a deserter, a scavenger and already a Rebel soldier at the start of the film.
Diego Luna’s Cassian Andor was even more complicated. Weitz says the character “was always meant to be compromised” but in earlier versions that compromise was much more severe and he was a double agent – a Rebel soldier secretly working for Krennic who changes his mind and flips to the Rebel side after he’s exposed as a spy.
Ultimately the result was a film that grossed just over $1 billion worldwide, a far better performer than the second spin-off “Solo” which didn’t even crack $400 million worldwide.
Source: Collider
