*Spoilers for ROGUE ONE below.*
Alright, so I think I’m in the majority when I say I think the best scene from ROGUE ONE was where Papa Vader lights up his saber and gives a ton of rebel soldiers a personal colonoscopy. But one of many revelations about the film coming from Gary Whitta reveals Vader was almost limited to merely one kill in the original draft of the script. One! Like he's some Padawan killer or something.
While talking with EW, Whitta revealed more about the original ending of the movie in the initial draft of the script, which had Jyn and Cassian surviving the battle, and probably going on a space honeymoon. But there’s more, and this time it involves the death of a one Orson Krennic (Ben Mendelsohn). In the final film he was taken down by Cassian, only to be completely obliterated by the Death Star while on Scarif. However, things originally went much more…implausibly, with Krennic surviving the full blast by finding “shelter”, and being brought back to the Death Star to see Vader:
They tore him out of the rubble and they brought him back. When they’re going over the ruins, he somehow survived. He survived the blast and they pulled him up and brought him to the Star Destroyer to report to Vader. He’s all beat up, his cape’s all torn up and stuff, and he thinks he has survived.
It was on the Death Star where Krennic finally met his doom with Vader using his powers to choke him to death. But upon realizing that required WAY too much explaining and a level 1,000 suspension of disbelief, the ending was replaced. In fact, the aforementioned Vader murder spree wasn’t added by Whitta, and didn’t come in till after he had left:
The rampage where [Vader] murdered everybody wasn’t me. That got added later. I had pictured early on Vader murdering all these Rebel soldiers but I never wrote it into the script. It was an idea that stuck around after I left and they ended up finding a cool way to use it. It’s actually my favorite thing in the film.
Agreed.
This is a great example of how much scripts go through the rewrite process in Hollywood. We would’ve had a wayyy different movie had this script been the final version, and people probably would’ve liked it a whole lot less. I mean, how does a scrap of metal save you from a planet-destroying beam? There’s no way around that! That’s like when they taught kids to protect themselves from a nuclear blast by hiding under their desks. What is this, INDIANA JONES 4? Well, at least we got the ending we got, and Vader’s kill count is that much higher. Seriously, do they even have refrigerators in the STAR WARS universe?
ROGUE ONE arrives on Blu-ray April 4.