New Rogue One: A Star Wars Story Featurette Highlights Links to A New Hope

The newest featurette to support Rogue One: A Star Wars Story focuses on a message that Lucasfilm needs to get clearly across over the course of the next month until release: just how Rogue One fits into the larger Star Wars story. Specifically, the featurette focuses on its direct link to Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope. The message has to be delivered intelligently, so fans better understand that this isn't the continuation of the Star Wars episodic films that returned with last year's The Force Awakens.

In the video, full of behind-the-scenes content and shots of stars like Felicity Jones and director Gareth Edwards chattinga bout the film, we see how things from that original Star Wars movie have come into Rogue One in a significant manner. The war room table used in both films is identical, for instance, and the movie pulls more than just surface aesthetics from the original trilogy.

"If I'd known since I was 4 that I was going to be shooting a Star Wars film, I would've planned it all my life," Edwards said of the process. "The cast and crew just stops and takes it in - oh, we're actually in Star Wars," Jones added.

Edwards says that while it's an ensemble movie, Jyn Erso's story is "at the heart." The featurette also shows a few new quick shots, including a new line from K-2SO (Alan Tudyk) that hearkens a bit to a classic Star Wars line, and an extended sequence of the battle on Scarif, one of the new planets in the film where a crucial fight will take place.

Rogue One: A Star Wars Story hits US theaters December 16, 2016. Directed by Gareth Edwards, it's the first of the new standalone features from Lucasfilm and Disney, which take place outside the core "Skywalker Saga" of films noted by an Episode number. Rogue Onetells the story of the small band of rebels that were tasked with stealing the plans to the first Death Star. The story spins directly off the opening crawl from the original Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope. In that crawl, it read: "Rebel spaceships, striking from a hidden base, have won their first victory against the evil Galactic Empire. 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."

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