Rogue One director on why we'll probably never see the original ending

We've known for a while that there's a bunch of extra Rogue One footage sitting around somewhere - with plenty of glimpses of it cut into the film's various trailers.

Rumours of Disney undertaking massive re-shoots for the film actually turned out to be true; though that news is usually a sign that a production is in major trouble, Rogue One proved the rare beast that actually benefited deeply from its re-shot footage; specifically the film's ending, which has been lauded as a tightly-paced, action-packed finale.

Thanks to both the film's editors and its own director, Gareth Edwards, we have a good idea of what those original scenes contained; specifically near its end, with the trailers showing a cut action scene featuring both Cassian (Diego Luna) and Jyn Erso (Felicity Jones) running across Scarif's beaches with the Death Star plans.

Fans inevitably hoped those scenes would make it to the film's home entertainment release, but that hasn't been the case, with Edwards himself tampering any hopes they'll ever make the light of day.

"There's not an individual scene that you can drag and drop and put on a Blu-ray," he told Fandago. "There are little things that would come and go during the process of post-production, but they're not scenes. They're more moments within the scenes or a single shot. So it's impossible to be able to do that, and that's why the decision was made."

"The stuff people talk about, like what they saw in the trailer, they're not scenes you can just put on a DVD. They're moments within scenes and threads, and you pull a thread and it all changes. It was changing the whole time. It's not like there was one version and then there was this other version -- it was like this thing that incrementally evolved constantly through all of post-production and didn't stop until there was a gun at our heads and we were forced to release the movie."

Particularly, the alternate battle scene on Scarif will likely never be seen for the simple reason that, "The visual effects were never finished on it. It's not like there's something sitting somewhere. I feel like making a film is like a sport where someone blows a whistle and that's it -- the score is what it is. And the goal is to win. If I could go back and do the film knowing what I know now, the final film would be completely different."

"I'd probably be willing to make Star Wars for the next 10 years and never let go of it -- constantly trying to finesse and find new ideas. But at some point, it stops, and it is the movie. The film that got released, I feel like that is the film, and everything else is just the process of making it."

Rogue One is out on DVD & Blu-ray 10 April.