**Spoilers ahead** Big ideas can come from the smallest and most unlikely places, and it’s still pretty amazing to think that “Rogue One: A Star Wars Story” was sparked from a single line in the opening crawl from the original “Star Wars“:
During the battle, Rebel spies managed to steal secret plans to the Empire’s ultimate weapon, the DEATH STAR, an armored space station with enough power to destroy an entire planet.
It was John Knoll, Chief Creative Officer at Industrial Light & Magic, who pitched the idea to Lucasfilm, and drafted a very early treatment. As you’d expect, an intensive development process began, and ‘Rogue One’ evolved right up until this summer’s reshoots, which as we’ve previously detailed, saw a lot of changes to the shape and involvement of various characters, and the opening and closing acts of the movie.
Indeed, with all the tie-in books now canon to the “Star Wars” universe, you can definitely go down a rabbit hole of what-could’ve-been and Slashfilm has been doing that, diving into “The Art of Rogue One” and “Rogue One: The Ultimate Visual Guide.” And it’s fascinating to learn how the original idea of a “really low-budget,” “Mission: Impossible” meets “The Hunt For Red October” movie, featuring “limited characters,” became the movie we know, and in particular, how a couple of key characters evolved through the process.
Presented in the film as a bureaucrat looking for more power, Ben Mendelsohn‘s Krennic was at one point an Imperial spy who fell in with Jyn and her team, and reported what he learned back to an Imperial intelligence operative. Obviously, Krennic is not even close to that in ‘Rogue One,’ but it certainly points to an entirely different vision for the story early on.
Meanwhile, one of the biggest ways ‘Rogue One’ deviates from other “Star Wars” films is that we don’t see any Jedi. Even Donnie Yen‘s Chirrut Îmwe, a strong believer in The Force, isn’t Force sensitive himself. However, early on, a story idea was kicked around that had Jyn’s mother as a Jedi, hiding from the Empire. But when screenwriter Chris Weitz joined the project, that concept was scrapped as he wanted to explore an era of “broken faith, a galaxy without hope.”
These are just a couple of kernels, but if you want to go full nerd, head to Slashfilm, who also reveal an early version of the ending, where Jyn survives and has with her the plans for the Death Star.