According to io9 entertainment reporter Germain Lussier, 50 percent of the trailer or teaser footage released for Rogue One: A Star Wars Story does not appear in the movie. After the Rogue One premiere, Lussier tweeted his (positive) reactions, then reviewed the footage used in marketing Rogue One.
Here’s what he found:
So @JayneLyons and I just watched all the trailers and teasers for #RogueOne . Without exaggeration, 50% of it or more isn't in the movie.
— Germain Lussier (@GermainLussier) December 11, 2016
Lussier made a few follow-up clarifications: that he had reviewed “the three official trailers… and the Celebration clip” (above) and that the loss of the footage is “not a bad thing cause the movie works very well.”
Still, it’s a remarkable claim. While this would seem to speak to the massive changes Rogue One has gone through in the wake of substantial reshoots, it might also be due to Gareth Edwards’ footage-heavy, “organic” shooting style, which he described to Lussier in July:
“Normally on a set the extras are told, ‘Okay on action you walk over there and on cut you stop.’ We said, ‘Okay for the next hour you’re cooking food, or you’re doing this car thing,’ and the crew were wearing costumes so if the cameras turned around on them, they wouldn’t be in the shot.”
For now we have only a marketing-level sense of what happened during the production of Rogue One, but everything points to a studio going to Herculean efforts to change (or salvage) their year’s biggest release. It should be an interesting story in a few years, when people feel a little freer to tell the truth about what went down behind-the-scenes. But for now all we can do is hope that, whatever they did, it worked.
We’ll finally be able to see Rogue One: A Star Wars Story on Thursday.
