As part of their excellent on-going coverage of Rogue One: A Star Wars Story this week, Entertainment Weekly’s Anthony Breznican provides an update on the infamous reshoots.  While acknowledging that reports on the extent of the reshoots are widely varied, it seems that most of EW’s sources insist that the reshoots are par for the course and no reason to worry.  Breznican was able to find some interesting details regarding the reshoots:

In our own deep-dive into the rumors, we found that about five weeks of reshoots were set, wrapping up just before Star Wars Celebration in mid-July.

Our confidential sources also revealed that Bourne screenwriter andMichael Clayton filmmaker Tony Gilroy was being brought in to write additional dialogue and direct some secondary units on the movie — alongside director Gareth Edwards, who collaborated with Gilroy in a similar capacity on 2014’s Godzilla.

…

The movie has not been screened for test audiences, but EW’s sources on the film say that Lucasfilm’s in-house braintrust — which weighs in on films similarly to the way it’s done at Pixar — felt Rogue One needed to punch up its emotion and action beats. (They also confirm that although it went largely unreported last year, The Force Awakens also underwent weeks of reshoots in the summer of 2015.)

Further, Director Gareth Edwards commented on the challenge of conducting reshoots with a large and diverse cast:

“Obviously, you’ve got to work around everyone’s schedule, and everyone’s on different films all over the world, and so it’s a bit of a logistical nightmare,” he said. “That’s why I think it’s been blown out of proportion a little bit.”

It seems that the company line remains that the reshoots are business as usual and this is all part of a process that was laid out from the beginning.  One issue in particular that has come up in various reports is whether the reshoots were needed to change the tone of the film:

Kathleen Kennedy, the president of Lucasfilm and producer of Rogue One, said the tone of the movie — which was billed as a Band of Brothers-style combat tale at last year’s Celebration event — isn’t being altered.

“There’s nothing about the story that’s changing, with a few things that we’re picking up in additional photography,” she said. “I think that’s the most important thing, to reassure fans that it’s the movie we intended to make.”

Personally I’m happy to hear that it sounds like Edwards will continue to make the Star Wars movie that he wants to make and Kathleen Kennedy and Lucasfilm seem to be on board with that.  I was excited about the tone of Rogue One that was promoted way back in Celebration Anaheim, and it doesn’t seem like that approach has changed.  Ultimately all of the drama surrounding the reshoots, whether they are substantial or not, won’t matter as long as the finished product is a great Star Wars movie.