From the trailers and many interviews, we know that Rogue One: A Star Wars Story had a different and less dramatic ending where some characters, including Jyn Erso, survived. Is that ending featured in some novelization, comics or other media?
From the answer and other online references, one can safely assume that we will never see it on film, but was the original ending leaked somewhere like what happened later with Colin Trevorrow's original Star Wars 9 script?
Director Gareth Edwards has stated in interviews that he doesn't think it likely that an 'alternate cut' will ever see the light of day, or even many deleted scenes. The film was so VFX heavy that unfinished scenes are basically unwatchable nonsense and quite a lot of it wouldn't make much sense anyway since it's so divorced from the earlier plot.
"There's not an individual scene that you can drag and drop and put on a Blu-ray," he said. "There are little things that would come and go during the process of postproduction, but they're not scenes. They're more moments within the scenes or a single shot. So it's impossible to be able to do that, and that's why the decision was made."
As for the moments like the aforementioned TIE fighter shot, Edwards explained why we won't see how that fit into the overall story. "The stuff people talk about, like what they saw in the trailer, they're not scenes you can just put on a DVD. They're moments within scenes and threads, and you pull a thread and it all changes. It was changing the whole time. It's not like there was one version and then there was this other version -- it was like this thing that incrementally evolved constantly through all of postproduction and didn't stop until there was a gun at our heads and we were forced to release the movie."
When it comes to the TIE-fighter shot, Edwards is remaining quiet about it for now. "Yeah, it's going to have to remain a myth because it's sort of the thing where you're trying ideas out to find the right version of the movie, and at the same time marketing is getting excited about certain shots and moments. Eventually, you'll see something presented to you and you'll be like, wait a minute, this shot is no longer in the film."
Edwards added that we'll never see an alternate version of that Scarif battle for a pretty simple reason: "The visual effects were never finished on it," he said. "It's not like there's something sitting somewhere. I feel like making a film is like a sport where someone blows a whistle and that's it -- the score is what it is. And the goal is to win. If I could go back and do the film knowing what I know now, the final film would be completely different. I'd probably be willing to make Star Wars for the next 10 years and never let go of it -- constantly trying to finesse and find new ideas. But at some point, it stops, and it is the movie. The film that got released, I feel like that is the film, and everything else is just the process of making it."
GARETH EDWARDS EXPLAINS WHY WE'LL PROBABLY NEVER SEE THOSE 'ROGUE ONE' ALTERNATE SCENES
