Star Wars: Rogue One's Original Ending Was Too Long, Director Says

Star Wars: Rogue One director Gareth Edwards has shared some new insight into the movie's alternate ending and talked about the possibility of Lucasfilm releasing it someday.

MAJOR SPOILERS FOLLOW BELOW.

Speaking to Slashfilm, Edwards said the original ending was simply too long. In the original cut, the transmission tower on Scarif was separate from the main base. Jyn and her squadmates needed to run across the beach and scale the tower to deliver the plans to the Death Star.

"In cutting the film, it just felt too long," Edwards said. "We had to find ways to compress the third act, which was quite long as it was. And one real, fast, brutal solution was to put the tower in the base, so they don't have to run across the beach and do all of that stuff to get there. That became a decision that eliminated the shots you see in the trailer of the back of Cassian and Jyn and the AT-ATs. That was some of the reinvention that happened. It was all to do with compression."

While it might have been fun to see this extended action sequence, it was ultimately too long and did a disservice to the movie, Edwards said.

"You can't outstay your welcome," he explained. "We've all sat in a movie, and even if you love a film, there's that moment where you want to look at your watch, or you feel like, 'Okay, I hope it ends soon.' You don't want the audience thinking that. You don't want them to lag. If you feel that when you watch something back, you need to find a way to tighten it somewhere. That was a big win for a compression."

Asked if Lucasfilm will ever release this alternate ending, Edwards said, "That's a decision way above me! I don't think there's any plans to do it."

All the main characters die at the end of Rogue One, which was not Edwards' original idea. He said in a previous interview that he did not think Lucasfilm would be okay with killing everyone off, and initially mapped the movie out with the main cast surviving.

"We thought we weren't going to be allowed to [kill all the main characters], but [Lucasfilm president Kathleen Kennedy] and everyone at Disney were like, 'Yeah it makes sense. I guess they have to because they're not in A New Hope,'" Edwards said.

Intriguingly, a report claimed that Jyn actress Felicity Jones could play the character again in another movie. There is speculation that she might appear in a young Luke Skywalker film, but this is not confirmed.

Rogue One made more than $1 billion at the global box office. The next Star Wars movie is this year's The Last Jedi, which will pick up directly after the events of 2015's The Force Awakens.