Skip to main content

Feast your eyes on the first sizzle reel for ‘Rogue One: A Star Wars Story’

Star Wars Celebration kicked off this week in London, and it’s clear that The Force is strong with this year’s convention.

How strong? Well, it just gave us a new poster (see below) and a behind-the-scenes teaser (or a “sizzle reel,” if you want to use the industry term) for Rogue One: A Star Wars Story full of fresh footage and practical effects for fans to fawn over.

Rogue One Teaser

Clocking in with nearly three minutes of footage, the new teaser features showcases the work both behind the camera and in front of it that’s going into this year’s Star Wars standalone film. The preview was introduced by the cast and creative team on Rogue One during Friday’s movie panel at Star Wars Celebration, hosted by Star Wars: The Force Awakens (and Game of Thrones) actress Gwendoline Christie.

The Rogue One teaser is the second major preview the studio has released for the upcoming Star Wars spinoff, which unfolds during the time between the events of Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the Sith and the franchise-starting Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope. The film tells the story of the ragtag group of rebel agents tasked with stealing the plans to the Death Star — the same plans that become the focal point of the original 1977 film.

Directed by Monsters and Godzilla filmmaker Gareth Edwards, Rogue One stars Oscar-nominated The Theory of Everything actress Felicity Jones as Jyn Erso, and she’s joined in the cast by Diego Luna (Milk), Ben Mendelsohn (Bloodline), Donnie Yen (Ip Man), Jiang Wen (Let the Bullets Fly), Forest Whitaker (The Last King of Scotland), Mads Mikkelsen (Hannibal), and Riz Ahmed (Nightcrawler). Firefly actor Alan Tudyk provides the motion-capture performance for the robot K-2SO.

Rogue One: A Star Wars Story is scheduled to hit theaters December 16.

Editors' Recommendations

Rick Marshall
A veteran journalist with more than two decades of experience covering local and national news, arts and entertainment, and…
The Mandalorian season 3 finale gives the Star Wars series a much-needed reset
Bo-Katan holds up the Darksaber in The Mandalorian season 3 finale.

And just like that, The Mandalorian season 3 is over. Coming off a seemingly game-changing episode last week, the series’ highly anticipated season 3 finale, titled The Return, premiered this Wednesday on Disney+. To say that the episode wraps up all of The Mandalorian season 3’s remaining loose ends would be quite the understatement, too.

Not only does the finale give fans the climactic confrontation between Moff Gideon (Giancarlo Esposito), Din Djarin (Pedro Pascal), and Bo-Katan (Katee Sackhoff) that they’ve long waited to see, but it also sets the latter two characters on totally different paths. For Bo-Katan, her role in the reconstruction of Mandalore seems to be just beginning. For Din Djarin, a new road has been laid out in front of him that isn't all that different from the one he used to walk.

Read more
James Mangold’s Dawn of the Jedi movie can save Star Wars
Cover art for the Star Wars: Dawn of the Jedi comic book series by John Ostrander and Jan Duursema.

This year's Star Wars Celebration brought exciting new looks into upcoming projects ranging from TV to movies, as well as the announcement that James Mangold (Logan, Ford v Ferrari) will helm an origin story of sorts set during the Dawn of the Jedi. And while this film will be looking back to the past, being set a whopping 25,000 years before the Battle of Yavin depicted in Star Wars: Episode IV -- New Hope, it is already poised to be one of the boldest theatrical premises for the franchise.

Star Wars has always been a universe characterized by great potential that's gone surprisingly untapped, with virtually endless storytelling possibilities in the distant past and far future. To address the elephant in the room, Lucasfilm also has a shoddy track record of late in axing or shelving announced and reported projects more than actually developing others, but Mangold's deft direction could break tired conventions and pave the way for the exciting Old Republic era on the big and small screens.
Breaking away from the Skywalker formula

Read more
A new Star Wars quest begins in the first trailer for Ahsoka
Rosario Dawson as Ahsoka Tano in Ahsoka.

Today at Star Wars Celebration, Lucasfilm unveiled trailers for three of its upcoming Star Wars series. Unfortunately, the only trailer that the fans at home will get to see is for Ahsoka, a new original show featuring Rosario Dawson as the fan-favorite heroine from Star Wars: The Clone Wars. As revealed during her guest appearance on The Mandalorian, Ahsoka is seeking out an old enemy, Grand Admiral Thrawn, a popular character from the Star Wars novels. And his return as "the heir to the Empire" is something that has Ahsoka deeply concerned.

Ahsoka | Teaser Trailer | Disney+

Read more