In Rogue One’s initial screenplay, Jyn Erso and Cassian Andor saw a different ending. In a now-deleted interview with Empire (excerpted by Gizmodo), Gareth Edwards explained the inconsistencies between the movie’s trailer and the final cut: the film’s planet-zapping finale was decided on fairly late in the game. “The very first version, they didn’t [all die],” Edwards told Empire, according to Gizmodo. “And it was just assumed by us that we couldn’t do that … So I was trying to figure out how this ends where that doesn’t happen. And then everyone read that and there was this feeling of like, ‘They’ve got to die, right?’ And everyone was like, ‘Yeah, can we?’” Edwards said that after he made that change, he expected a request to shoot an alternate ending, but he ultimately got to stick with the ending he wanted. “I kept waiting for someone to go, ‘You know what? Could we just film an extra scene where we see Jyn and Cassian, they’re okay and they’re on another planet?’ And it never came. No one ever gave us that note, so we got to do it,” he said. Though the real loser in that final blowout wasn’t a franchise without more Jyn or Cassian, but the death of K-2S0, whose Rogue One fate made him unavailable for all the starring roles the droid deserves.
