In the run up to the home-video release of Disney $DIS’s Rogue One—which lands in the US today, on digital platforms like iTunes and Amazon $AMZN Video, and DVD and Blu-ray on Apr. 4—the film’s cast and crew have been sharing the juicy—and gory—details of what could have been in the film.
The movie, the first ever Star Wars standalone film, which earned more than $1 billion at the global box office, underwent extensive rewrites and reshoots before it debuted last December.
Unfortunately, fans won’t get to see the alternate scenes that didn’t make the final cut in the DVD and Blu-ray release.
Director Gareth Edwards told Fandango that’s because many of the scenes, like the alternate version of the battle of Scarif in which Jyn Erso (Felicity Jones) is seen in an early trailer running across the beach with the plans to the Death Star in hand, were never completed. Others, like the scene where the TIE fighter rises to confront Jyn on the Imperial tower, were cut from the movie early on, when the filmmakers were still figuring out what the right version would be. And other plans for the film merely existed on paper and never made it into production.
“There’s not an individual scene that you can drag and drop and put on a Blu-ray,” Edwards told the site. “There are little things that would come and go during the process of postproduction, but they’re not scenes. They’re more moments within the scenes or a single shot.”
And there were many, many of those moments in Rogue One.
Fans lamented the lack of an opening crawl, a staple of the Star Wars franchise, after Rogue One’s release. The story, in which the Rebel soldiers steal the plans to the Death Star that Luke Skywalker and the Rebels later use to blow it up, was basically the movie version of the opening crawl in A New Hope.
Edwards revealed during a Reddit $RDDT AMA this month that the first draft of the script, written by Gary Whitta, did have a crawl and he told Entertainment Tonight last summer that the crawl was axed to further distance the standalone movie from the saga films.
Whitta declined to submit the document for fan inspection.
Despite her early reluctance in the movie, Rogue One‘s main character Jyn Erso was always meant to be the leader of the ragtag group of Rebels who band together to steal the plans for the Death Star, the early concept art revealed. Her character ended up in a very different place than she started, however.
Riz Ahmed, who played the defecting Imperial pilot Bodhi Rook, was originally hired to play a different character.
In an early screenplay, Ahmed was supposed to play Bokan, an Imperial engineer who was kidnapped by Saw Gerrera and developed Stockholm Syndrome after years of living with him, Ahmed told EW. Gerrera needed Bokan because he lived on a planet with a strong electromagnetic field, which meant the electronics never worked.
Jyn and her Rebel crew’s ship originally went down on the moon where Gerrera was hiding out. (Part of the reason that Gerrera was never found by the Empire is that he modified his ships to survive in that environment where nothing else could, Whitta said.) Bokan would have helped them repair an old Imperial shuttle found on the planet.
Edwards said Bokan became Bodhi because he thought the evolution of a character, who started with the bad guys but morphed into a hero who dies for the rebellion, would have been stronger if he’d known Galen Erso, Jyn’s father. They named the character Bodhi, which means awakening, for that reason, Ahmed said.
Bodhi’s death was also tweaked in reshoots. In an earlier version, he died during the sequence where he risked his life to plug in the cable. He was shot running into the ship and crawled his way there, where he died, instead of perishing in the explosion, as he does in the finished film.
The re-programmed Imperial security droid was originally modeled after C-3PO, early concept art showed.
He was also slain by the villainous Krennic, in early filming, but that didn’t feel right, actor Alan Tudyk, who played the droid, told CinemaBlend. In the final version, K-2SO dies holding off the Stormtroopers while Jyn and Cassian Andor (Diego Luna) retrieve the plans for the Death Star.
Darth Vader had a different kill sequence in another draft of the script. In what sounds like an epilogue, Krennic would have somehow survived the Death Star’s planet-killing laser and been rescued by Imperial forces. Just when he thought he made it and served the Empire valiantly, an off-screen force—Vader, presumably—would have mercilessly choked the life out of him for his failure.
Whitta, who drafted the initial script that was rewritten by Chris Weitz and then Tony Gilroy, said the scene was cut because it was too much of a stretch to keep Krennic alive, according to EW. The scene where Vader rampages a darkened hallway full of Rebels was added in later by another writer.
There were at least three other ways Rogue One could have ended. This explains some of the footage from the trailers that was missing in the finished movie, which was broken down by Slashfilm.
