10 Biggest Problems Star Wars: Rogue One Faces (And How Lucasfilm Can Fix Them)
If you continue to reshoot, what will you become?
This isn't the age of shared universes. This is not even the age of superheroes. This is the age of Star Wars. And there's nothing more exciting than a Star Wars movie.
Yes, there may be more film than ever released year-upon-year, but it's looking like the future is going to be dominated by that galaxy far, far away. We're now almost four years on from Disney's acquisition of Lucasfilm and with it the Star Wars license, and since then they've been hard at work earning that $4.05 billion back. The Force Awakens was a juggernaut, receiving across the board rave reviews and smashing up the box office in what had already been a banner year, and that's before even touching on the more-than-comparable merchandise revenue.
Next up is Rogue One: A Star Wars Story [sic], a standalone movie set just before the events of the original film telling how exactly the Rebel Alliance got those Death Star plans (hint: it wasn't easy). For any Star Wars fan that's a pretty delectable notion - I was sold on Opening Crawl: The Movie. However, things don't seem to be quite as amped up as they were a year ago for Episode VII. And it must be said the road to Rogue One hasn't exactly been smooth.
Let's take a look over the ten biggest potential sticking points and what - if anything - Lucasfilm can do to deal with them.
10. The Title Confusion
The Problem: When Rogue One was first announced, it was simply as one of several Star Wars spinoffs. Then this enterprise became known as Star Wars Anthologies, and while that still may be the case (Wookiepedia says so), the individual movies are now subtitled "A Star Wars Story". As such, the full name of the film is Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, which is a wordy mess and rather confusing given that removing the Episode title from The Force Awakens seemed to be allowing a more homogenous Star Wars: [Subtitle] structure.
Why is this a problem? Well, aside from making calling it the right thing an absolute pain (I've just gone with Star Wars: Rogue One because that's what everyone's using anyway), it hurts the branding; if nobody calls it A Star Wars Story, it's not really representing the film.
How They Can Fix It: Given the film's not struggling to get attention and trailer views, it may not be an issue. Star Wars is such a strong brand, and Rogue One is so clearly a part of it that any failings in SEO are negligible.
As for the previous muddled names, not much can be done. Although, in some ways, it's almost a right of a passage for Star Wars films to have multiple titles; the original film had countless draft names and even after release cycled from Star Wars to Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope, while all the Disney-produced movies have had various name shifts.