Star Wars: Rogue One Ending Changed to Fix A New Hope Continuity

If George Lucas had known when he was making the original Star Wars (1977) that someday someone was going to come along and make a prequel that connects to it, he would’ve probably paid more attention to the contradictory dialogue referring to the stolen Death Star plans.

In the beginning of A New Hope while interrogating Princess Leia on her ship, Darth Vader says to her, “Several transmissions were beamed to this ship by rebel spies. I want to know what happened to the plans they sent you.” But later on in the film, Admiral Conan Antonio Motti says to Vader, “Your sad devotion to that ancient religion has not helped you conjure up the stolen data tapes.”

Since the dialogue above offered up two versions of how the plans were delivered to the Rebel Alliance, Rogue One director, Gareth Edwards, and his team were left with a pesky question: “Did they steal data tapes or was it transmissions?”

Instead of picking one or the other, Edwards went with both. However, trying to figure out how to squeeze both in proved problematic to the film’s pace.

“The original version was that they stole the plans, tried to get back to the ship and on their way, it all went wrong,” Edwards told EW. “They were forced to go to the transmission tower and send them to the Rebels. It was too long. We tried to compress things. One of the obvious solutions to compress the time was to put the transmission tower at the base [where they steal the data tapes.]”

Before coming up with the aforementioned solution, Jyn Erso, Cassian Andor, and K-2SO were going to have to race across the beach to a separate transmission tower. Unused footage and stills from that scene were used to promote the film, but won’t be included in the Blu-ray release.

“They no longer have to go on a journey across the beach, and some of those decisions can be heartbreaking because I loved a lot of the material we got from that moment,” Edwards explained. “The film as a whole always wins. We needed to keep the duration down to two hours. No matter how well you’re doing in a movie there’s always the point where the audience gets a bit antsy. You don’t want people to have that feeling in a Star Wars film.”

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Directed by Gareth Edwards, Rogue One: A Star Wars Story is 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 One tells the story of a small band of rebels tasked with stealing the plans to the first Death Star. Its 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.”

The cast features Felicity Jones, Diego Luna, Ben Mendelsohn, Donnie Yen, Mads Mikkelsen, Alan Tudyk, Riz Ahmed, Jimmy Smits, James Earl Jones, Jiang Wen, and Forest Whitaker.

Rogue One: A Star Wars Story hits Digital HD today and then Blu-ray and DVD on April 4.