For most of the summer, the term "reshoots" would trigger unease in any Star Wars fan. As we first learned in May, Disney was reportedly unhappy with the first cut of Rogue One and sent the movie back for four weeks of expensive reshoots. As a result, many of the big scenes fans saw in the trailers didn't appear in the final film that was released on 16 December. Now, for anyone still curious about what changed in the movie this summer—or what could have been—Yahoo! Movies spoke with the Rogue One editors about what changed in the standalone Star Wars film.
Specifically, the basic construction of the main characters was overhauled.
The story was reconceptualised to some degree, there were scenes that were added at the beginning and fleshed out. We wanted to make more of the other characters, like Cassian's character [Cassian Andor, the Rebel spy played by Diego Luna], and Bodhi's character [Bodhi Rook, the defected Imperial pilot played by Riz Ahmed]. The scene with Cassian's introduction with the spy, Bodhi traipsing through Jedha on his way to see Saw, these are things that were added. Also Jyn [Jyn Erso, the reluctant leader of the film, played by Felicity Jones], how we set her up and her escape from the transporter, that was all done to set up the story better.
As they explain here, originally the story jumped from Jyn as a kid to her in a meeting with the rebels, skipping everything in between. The editors point out that this would have been too big of a jump in the story. And rightly so. The reshoots added the scene of Jyn getting rescued from the prison transporter, a small detail that fills in the gap between what she was doing as a kid/young adult—bad things!—and now. They also mention filling out other members of the main cast.
And thankfully they ended up doing this, because even with the reshoots some of these characters leave more to be desired in the final cut. It's hard to imagine if they would have worked at all otherwise.
What has been discussed the most, however, is the third act of the film. As many people with far more dedication have concluded from looking at the original trailers, many of the characters either didn't die or didn't die when they did in the final cut of the film. Unfortunately, the editors are reluctant to go into detail about the final act, but here's what they do say:
It changed quite a bit. The third act has a lot going on. You have like seven different action venues, the mechanics of the act changed quite a bit in terms of the characters, and I don't want to go into too much detail about what had been there before, but it was different.
It's very possible that originally some of these characters lived through the movie. Specifically, the scene of Jyn running with K-2SO and the plans is pretty telling. Of course, we'll never really know what the film could have been—or not been! Considering Rogue One made $801.9 million in less than three weeks and has been mostly adored by critics, we can call the film and its reshoots a success.
