On Tuesday, news broke that this year's first big Star Wars spinoff film, Rogue One, would be going back for several weeks of reshoots after Disney executives reportedly screened an early cut of the film and felt it was tonally off. According to The Hollywood Reporter, the executives present felt that Rogue One didn't feel the way a "classic Star Wars movie" should feel, citing an unnamed source who said it had "the feel of a war movie." The reshoots, then, hope "to lighten the mood, bring some levity into the story, and restore a sense of fun to the adventure."

The Rogue One: A Star Wars Story Teaser Hints at a Darker Kind of Star Wars Movie Remember how Disney wants to make a Star Wars movie every year? Here's what that'll feel like.

The pressure on Rogue One is extreme—it's essentially a litmus test to see if people will come out in droves for a Star Wars movie that's not a numbered installment in the story that began with A New Hope. There are a whole mess of these "Anthology" films planned, including that Young Han Solo film you may have heard about and another top-secret movie. If Rogue One flops, it will be bad for the aggressive and already well under way plans Disney has for its spate of Star Wars movies.

Reshoots, as THR and countless other industry publications note, are no big deal these days—they're just about par for the course when it comes to modern blockbuster filmmaking, and they offer zero indication as to the quality of a project. But let's hope it wasn't just skittishness at whether an audience is ready for a Star Wars "war movie" that sent Rogue One back into production.

The stated mission of the Anthology movies is to focus on characters, worlds, and stories wildly different from the core saga of Solos and Skywalkers, but the two Anthology films announced thus far are explicitly prequels to the original Star Wars movies, focusing on the hunt for the plans to the Death Star and the early days of swashbuckling smuggler Han Solo. These do not seem terribly imaginative on the surface, but that's something that can be mitigated by a plot that takes us to strange and unusual places, crafted by filmmakers who work to give them a distinct feel.

Lightening up Rogue One could be antithetical to the whole point of these Anthology films, offering audiences just another Star Wars film instead of something new and fresh within the same universe.

In that case, lightening up Rogue One could be antithetical to the whole point of these Anthology films, offering audiences just another Star Wars film instead of something new and fresh within the same universe. The idea of a serious war film set in the Star Wars universe is fascinating, and something we haven't really seen before. Despite having the very word in its title, Star Wars, as a series of stories, isn't all that interested in war. Planets are destroyed and battles waged and we even get to see some of that happen, but storytellers have never really dug in—never really gotten a boots-on-the-ground perspective of what it's like to be in a war against an oppressive Empire that will destroy your planet from space just to make a point.

We were not, of course, in that very private Rogue One screening, so we have no idea whether or not the movie was good. Just that Disney felt the movie had tonal problems, which could mean a lot of things. But a new, darker, more grown-up kind of Star Wars movie is something worth pursuing. Worth clamoring for, even. Because in 2016, it's tougher to get big, expensive original movies made. It's much easier when they're tied into some huge, already successful franchise such as Star Wars or a comic book. And while that's kind of a drag in its own way, some of these franchises—like Star Wars—have wonderfully fleshed-out and well-realized worlds that can support just about any kind of story. Set out to make every film feel like "classic Star Wars" and you run the risk of just telling the same story over and over again.