Rogue One: Why They Cut the Iconic Shot of Imperial Jyn Erso

After Rogue One’s trailer dropped, the final shot of Jyn Erso became one of the most talked-about things on the internet. Yet, it didn’t appear in the film.

The first Rogue One trailer painted a very different film than the movie that we all ended up seeing in theaters. It made Rogue One seem like The Jyn Erso Movie and gave fans a bad taste. Further, its final shot (seen above) looked annoyingly similar to something out of The Hunger Games.

Of course, people immediately took to the internet to shout “Mary Sue!” at the sky. But once Rogue One debuted in theaters, we were all very (pleasantly) surprised by the finished result. Obviously, the reshoots helped the movie a lot. However, it appears that that iconic Jyn Erso shot was never intended to be in the movie anyway.

According to io9 (via the podcast, The Director’s Cut), shooting Rogue One included a lot of random shots for “Indie Hour.” Basically, the actors suited up and performed improv in hopes of catching some really fascinating shots that Gareth Edwards may or may not use in the final film.

"It was just a way for the crew of understanding, for now, we’re just going to do loads of random s**t. Don’t try to ask, we can’t explain. It would just be things I thought were a beautiful moment or ‘This is a great idea’ and a lot of the stuff in the trailer ended up through that process."

So, what happened with that iconic shot? Nothing. It looked cool, but honestly, it wasn’t shot for the movie.

"We finished a shot and [Felicity Jones] was just walking to the next shot, which was at the end of the tunnel. And as she walked, someone switched the lights on and the way they turned on they went *clickclickclick* like this. Someone called her, and she just turned around a little bit and I was like, “Oh my god that looked great.” And I was like “Stop stop stop!” and everyone stopped. “This will take 10 seconds, just roll camera”….Then obviously 10 seconds turned into a half hour, and we probably did 17 takes. So that ended and there’s that feeling of, “Well what was that for?” And I was like, “I don’t know, that just felt good.”"

Now, Lucasfilm cut a lot of stuff from that first teaser trailer. Plus, we know that Rogue One featured a less grim ending at one point, too. But if you’re Gareth Edwards and you’re living your lifelong dream to make a Star Wars movie, sometimes you just want to play around and enjoy things just because they’re cool. That’s it. It’s cool.

No further explanation needed.

Of course, with a surplus of footage, it became more difficult for the editing team to pick and choose what would make the cut. But I’m happy with the final film nonetheless, and so are the other people pushing it to a billion.

As a reminder, here’s a supercut of everything that didn’t make it into the film:

Rogue One: A Star Wars Story is now playing in theaters everywhere.

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