Lucas admitted the film needed work, but he was unprepared for the merciless assault that followed. No one said anything at the movie’s completion. As recounted in an excerpt of Dale Pollock’s Skywalking -The Life and Films of George Lucas, Lucas at one point showed a version of the film to a group of his friends, including Steven Spielberg, Brian De Palma, and the Time magazine film critic Jay Cocks. Indeed, it seems for every tale of hype for the first Star Wars, you can counter with a tale of naysaying. The ecstatic 1976 memo mentioned above was written during a time at 20th Century Fox otherwise defined by “skepticism on the part of the board of directors and some of the executive team” towards Lucas’s efforts, according to.
Rogue One is a standalone spinoff story about Rebel spies stealing Death Star plans before the events of A New Hope its director, Gareth Edwards, known primarily for an indie creature feature before he led 2014’s surprisingly visionary Godzilla reboot, has promised a harrowing, Force-less war film “about the fact that God’s not coming to save us.” But after the crowd-pleasing heroics of The Force Awakens dominated box offices worldwide, has Disney decided a darker, scarier, film-geek-friendly Star Wars experience is too risky a move? Or has the relatively inexperienced Edwards simply not brought the pieces of a would-be-tentpole movie together with sufficient finesse?Īnother possibility is that people should relax: Mixed reviews of rough cuts, and expensive reshoots, are typical of blockbuster filmmaking-as is demonstrated amply by the Star Wars franchise itself. Two competing and purely speculative narratives have taken root in fans’ mind over this development. Headlines with the words “crisis,” “bad,” and “panic” have ensued. Page Six reports that an early cut of the film isn’t testing well, and Disney has ordered four weeks of reshoots in July. This prescient document about the 1977 space opera that did end up smashing box-office records comes to mind when reading about the recent rumors surrounding Rogue One, the Star Wars film scheduled for release in December 2016. The Complications of Creating a New Star Wars Spencer Kornhaber