Darth Vader’s Force-filled rampage from Rogue One almost had one more casualty in the original ending: Orson Krennic. That’s right. In an early version of the story, Krennic survived the explosion on Scarif only to then die at the hands of Darth Vader.
Entertainment Weekly revealed today via an interview with screenwriter Gary Whitta that Imperial forces would have found Krennic, still alive, in the wreckage.
“They tore him out of the rubble and they brought him back,” Whitta says. “When they’re going over the ruins, he somehow survived.”
In that finale — which didn’t actually include the famed hallway fight scene where Vader delivers a moment of “horror” — after the blast, Krennic is “all beat up, his cape’s all torn up and stuff, and he thinks he has survived,” but ultimately, Whitta explains, “Vader kills him for his failure.” Talk about brutal working conditions.
“It’s a bit of a reach,” Whitta admitted, “which is why it isn’t in the finished film.” Either way, Krennic faced retribution.
In this version of the original ending, fan-favorite leading pair — Jyn Erso and a would-be version of Cassian Andor — also make it out alive.
So instead of a sunny ending where Jyn and Cassian lived happily ever after, we instead got the bleak reality of a suicide mission that meant everything to the Rebellion, cost a handful of heroes their lives, and Krennic met his end through Vader’s Force-grip instead of instant vaporization.
