I'm aware that most people and their grandmothers (and in some cases their grandmothers) all saw ROGUE ONE: A STAR WARS STORY already. But for the few of you who haven't, we're going to be going into SPOILER TERRITORY, so if you don't want the ending spoiled for you, don't continue after this point. Or do, this is a free country (for now, at least):
Anyway, for those of you still here, you may recall the last scene where Darth Vader mows down people with his lightsaber like a badass (the only time the film shows anything related to the Force or the Jedi in the entire runtime). Well, apparently that scene wasn't always there.
According to John Gilroy (editor of ROGUE ONE) in an interview with Yahoo! Movies, he claims:
What was added — and it was a fantastic add — was the Vader action scene, with him boarding the ship and dispatching all those rebel soldiers…That was something conceptualized a little later.
He also says, in the same interview, that the structure of the scene was always the same – Cassian and Jyn steal the plans on Scarif, transmit the data to the Rebel fleet above the planet, and the Rebels have to escape Vader (presumably still in the Star Destroyer). It seems that only the actual Darth Vader massacre itself was added. Which honestly makes sense, watching the film. In A NEW HOPE Princess Leia gets uppity with Vader about the ship being a counselor ship, though with ROGUE ONE now as canon, it's weird Vader didn't just say "What? I literally saw you trying to escape the battle five minutes ago!" That exchange in the original makes more sense if we just see a looming Star Destroyer chase after the fleet at the end of ROGUE ONE, and not with him literally seconds away from retrieving the plans via lightsaber death.
The scene was still f*cking badass though.
ROGUE ONE is currently in theaters, as if you didn't already know. And if you didn't? Well, now you do! Isn't learning fun?