Star Wars: Rogue One - 16 Major Details Lucasfilm Just Revealed
From returning characters to explaining those reshoots.
Despite being first announced way back in 2013, we've been told very little officially about Rogue One, the first in Disney's spin-off series that will take Star Wars from a family space opera into a massive shared universe of interlinked movies. There's been a basic plot summary (it's Opening Crawl: The Movie), a single still and last month we got a teaser trailer, but overall Lucasfilm have been incredibly tight-lipped about any hard story details or character information.
Until now! They've finally broken their silence with a massive cover story in Entertainment Weekly, which sees director Gareth Edwards, producer and Lucasfilm head honcho Kathleen Kennedy and Head of Story Development Kiri Hart dishing the dirt on the most down-and-dirty Star Wars yet. Rumours have been confirmed, characters revealed, and a blockade runner-load of stills revealed; if you're not deliriously excited then you're more beyond hope than Ben Solo. Rogue One always looked like an exciting prospect, a neat counterpart to The Force Awakens, but after all this it sounds like it could be something really special.
There's a lot of info in the story and the various online companions, so let's break down the biggest things we've learnt, from Sith Lords to Oppenheimer parallels.
16. There Probably Won't Be An Opening Crawl
It's been the biggest, most pernickety question about the standalone Star Wars films ever since they were announced; will they have an opening crawl? It's a series staple, yes, but it's also intrinsically linked into the idea of episodes; many games used to include one, but The Clone Wars animated movie (the last "spin-off") jumped straight into the action.
So what's the craic? Well, Kathleen Kennedy says it's currently undecided (which I find hard to believe - how do you have the opening of a film not sorted six months before release), but suggests the film definitely seems to be leaning towards a cold open:
"The crawl and some of those elements live so specifically within the ‘saga’ films that we are having a lot of discussion about what will define the [stand-alone] Star Wars Stories separate and apart from the saga films. So we’re right in the middle of talking about that.”
So basically the same motivation that we'd all been expecting. What's most interesting from that, though, is the struggle to define what exactly The Star Wars Story enterprise "is"; a stand-alone is by its nature separate, but there's tropes and tricks to be considered. It's going to be an interesting ride.