Potential spoiler for Solo: A Star Wars Story.

Solo: A Star Wars Story reused a shot from the marketing for previous anthology movie, Rogue One - but you may have easily missed it.

For the most part, Solo did a good job hiding its troubled production. Original directors Phil Lord & Chris Miller were fired in June 2017 over 80% of the way through principal photography, replaced by Ron Howard who went on to not only finish the film but reshoot a good chunk of their work. The specifics of Howard’s changes are still a tightly-held Lucasfilm secret, but it’s been alleged he filmed around 70% of the movie. Despite the fingerprints of three filmmakers on it, for the most part Solo feels very much like a singularly driven movie, with a distinct and consistent tone and style. However, at least one shot of the film doesn’t come from Lord, Miller or Howard.

At the end of Solo, we jump to a jungle planet where Han plays Lando for the Millennium Falcon (this time without the professional gambler cheating). This new, unnamed location is established with an areal shot of trees. Die-hard Star Wars fans may get a strange sense of deja vu, as this shot actually originates from the Star Wars Celebration 2015 teaser for Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (hat tip to the StarWarsLeaks reddit).

While the first trailer for Rogue One didn’t release until April 2016, those in attendance at the Celebration convention the year before got a concept tease. It started with a pan over a thick jungle as Obi-Wan Kenobi’s line from the original Star Wars, “For over a thousand generations, the Jedi Knights were the guardians of peace and justice in the Old Republic. Before the dark times. Before the Empire” plays over. The camera then panned up to reveal the Death Star hanging low in the sky before the title revealed itself. It was only ever a proof-of-concept - the plans were stolen from an oasis, Scarif, not a jungle in the released film - that played exclusively at Celebration, and so nobody ever expected it to be released.

However, the opening of this tease - that pan - is used with little alteration for Lando’s reestablishment at the end of Solo: A Star Wars Story. This was presumably done to save time and money: Howard had ten months to turn Solo around, so while reshoots were feasible, new CGI locations risked looking subpar, and as the assets already existed this was a simple way to add a new locale to the film. It’s fair to say the trick works in a roundabout way, although the clearly fake trees do nevertheless stand out alongside the film’s otherwise well-sanded visuals

So far, Rogue One is the only film to have exclusive teasers play at Celebration since Disney took over, but that wasn’t meant to be the case. Josh Trank’s Boba Fett almost had a teaser play that same year and a trailer cut from Lord & Miller’s Solo footage was allegedly prepared for Celebration 2017, but both were held back due to the studio being unhappy with the results (with the directors fired shortly after). It’s unlikely we’ll ever see either version, although this Rogue One/Solo crossover means you can never really know.

Next: Solo Reshoots: What’s Lord & Miller And What’s Ron Howard?

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