Rogue One served as the first of what was intended to be many "A Star Wars Story" spinoff movies, and with positive reviews and over $1 billion at the box office, it was definitely a hit. Solo would later underperform, of course, bringing an end to a slate that was supposed to include big screen adventures for characters like Yoda and Boba Fett.
While everything looked rosy for Rogue One on the surface, behind the scenes, things didn't go quite so smoothly. While Godzilla director Gareth Edwards was tasked with helming the movie, Tony Gilroy (who now serves as Andor's showrunner) was brought in to oversee extensive reshoots that made sweeping changes to the blockbuster.
Some of those changes are evident from Rogue One's trailers, with scenes featuring characters who should already be dead still alive and well or Jyn Erso squaring off with a TIE Fighter. Now, editor John Gilroy has shared new details with The Playlist (via SFFGazette.com) about how he and his brother Tony completely reshaped an entire movie.
"I don’t know how much I’m supposed to say about that, but...it was really changing things and using all the tricks in your bag as an editor to make things work however you need to make them work, you make them work."
"The basic plan was very simple," he continued. "They had the movie that they had and they called Tony in. And Tony huddled for a while with another editor, who was on already, Colin Goudie, and used a lot of the things that he had discovered when we were working together and just basically made a new story. It was quite a different story."
"And then [he] convinced Disney to invest in that story, which was a sizeable investment in time and money. And then it was just realizing what that was. So, it’s a new plan. You’re not just going in and experimenting. No, we had a new blueprint."
Gilroy would go on to explain that he never really paid much attention to what the other version of Rogue One looked like and noted that the "trajectory" of the story needed to be heavily altered. As suspected, though, it sounds like the biggest issues were with Rogue One's third act.
"A lot of big features, they go in, they have a weak third act, and then they shoot it, and then they see what they have, and then they go back for all these gigantic reshoots, and yeah...that’s a very expensive way of working. I mean, you can’t do that in television."
Edwards hasn't spoken too openly about his Rogue One experience, but it's apparent the movie was taken out of his hands and transformed by another filmmaker. That has to sting, but this was just the first of what's proven to be many creative differences Lucasfilm has had with directors over the years (Phil Lord & Chris Miller, Colin Trevorrow, and Patty Jenkins, for example).
Will we ever learn what Rogue One originally looked like? Probably not, but seeing as the plot of Trevorrow's Duel of the Fates later leaked online, it may well happen.