Gareth Explains Why “Rogue One: A Star Wars Story” Has No Deleted Scenes
It’s not uncommon for a substantial portion of a film to end up on the cutting room floor. In the case of a comedy such as Anchorman, sometimes an entirely new film can be created through the deleted scenes shown in the trailers. Rogue One: A Star Wars Story seemed as if it would be another example of such a project, but it now looks like we shouldn’t expect to see any deleted or alternate scenes on its upcoming digital and Blu-ray release because they won’t fit neatly into the story. Director Gareth Edwards recently explained why:
There’s not an individual scene that you can drag and drop and put on a Blu-ray. There are little things that would come and go during the process of postproduction, but they’re not scenes. They’re more moments within the scenes or a single shot. So it’s impossible to be able to do that, and that’s why the decision was made.
Gareth Edwards spoke to Fandango about the possibility of unused footage from Rogue One making its way into the upcoming Blu-ray release (which will hit shelves on April 4), but it sounds like we shouldn’t get our hopes up. Although quite a bit of material was cut from the movie as the crew fine-tuned the story, no full sequences or major subplots were removed from the final cut of the film. The final product was in a constant state of evolution right up until Rogue One actually hit theaters, but nothing that ended up on the cutting room floor was substantial enough to warrant its own deleted scene or sequence on the Blu-ray.
There’s one very specific example of this particular phenomenon that most fans of Rogue One will likely remember: the TIE fighter shot at the climax of the movie. If you recall, the shot consists of Jyn Erso (Felicity Jones) limping forward on a walkway as she prepares to transmit the Death Star plans to the Rebels — when the enormous ship suddenly appears in front of her. It’s an incredibly tense moment, and easily one of the coolest from the trailers.
As cool as that moment is in the trailers, there’s apparently no real way to cut it back into the movie to make it work in a cohesive fashion. Beyond that, Edwards went on to admit that some visual effects from the Scarif battle were never even finished, so the chance of a full TIE fighter sequence somehow existing on the cutting room floor seems less and less likely the more we learn about this film’s editing process. In the end, it might be for the best if we do not actually see this extra footage make its way back into the film for an extended version or a deleted scenes section. After all, the Extended Cut of David Ayer’s Suicide Squad proved that adding extra footage to a movie that does not fundamentally enhance the story does not inherently help a film. In fact, it can hurt it by bogging down the story.
Rogue One: A Star Wars Story will be available on digital platforms on March 24, and the Blu-ray edition of the latest Star Wars film will hit shelves on April 4. The saga will continue when Rian Johnson’s The Last Jedi debuts in theaters on December 15.
