Felicity Jones

The new year is officially off and running, and SNL mercifully isn’t going to let another day go by without us thinking about Rogue One. Jyn Erso herself, Felicity Jones makes her SNL debut in the first official 2017 promos, and wouldn’t you know it, likes to reference that Star Wars everyone seems so fond of.

The year’s final SNL host Casey Affleck poked fun at the seeming oddity of his own presence as the final guest of 2016, but if anyone seemed more appropriate, it’d be Rogue One star Felicity Jones. Thankfully, the erstwhile Jyn Erso will get her chance as the first host of 2017.

A couple of weeks back, someone asked Lucasfilm’s Kathleen Kennedy about a possible Rogue One sequel — a silly question given the film’s position in the Star Wars timeline, but not an entirely absurd one in this age of blockbuster franchises. The answer is, of course, no; there won’t be a Rogue One sequel because there already is a Rogue One sequel (it’s called A New Hope; maybe you’ve heard of it), and yet, Felicity Jones has the option to appear in a spinoff follow-up in her contract. Confusing? Not so much. Spoilers ahead!

It’s telling that Rogue One’s best character is a robot.

The long countdown to the release of Rogue One: A Star Wars Story on December 16 has at last hit the ten-day mark, and with buzz now at a nearly deafening roar, each day has demanded fresh preview material to keep the hordes of fans docile. It’s like an advent calendar, but instead of delicious chocolates and trinkets symbolizing holiday cheer, we get fragmented, context-free snippets symbolizing the insatiable will of America’s pop-culture mavens. It’s the reason for the season, and by “it,” I mean “the inability to allow one’s self to be pleasantly surprised by a blockbuster.”

Let the countdown begin! We’re exactly two weeks away from the next Star Wars movie and the anticipation is building. We’ve seen trailers of Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, we’ve rewatched clips on loop, and today Lucasfilm and Twitter collaborated to debut never-before-seen footage from the upcoming spin-off.

We’ve still got 15 days on the clock until the wait for Rogue One: A Star Wars Story comes to an end. And while fans can kill the next couple of weeks watching the two-and-a-half-minute trailer approximately 8,600 times, there are better ways to run out the clock, and of course I don’t mean “going outside” or “talking to another person.” Felicity Jones, out on the publicity circuit to talk up the impending release of Rogue One, sat down with late-night talk show host/overgrown summer camp counselor Jimmy Fallon last night. The actress showed off some of the moves she picked up during her martial arts training for the film, and then Fallon casually introduced the first official clip of footage from Rogue One as if he wasn’t giving fans simultaneous heart attacks across the globe.

If you’re going to fight a Rebellion, you better have some rebellious soldiers. That’s why Jyn Erso (Felicity Jones) is the key to Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, this winter’s big Star Wars standalone film, supposedly the first in an ever expanding cinematic universe of spinoffs from the main movie saga (that continues next December with the still-untitled Episode VIII).

While we’ll have to wait a year for another Star Wars episode, Rogue One is here to tide us over until then, and Lucasfilm has been putting out tons of promotional material to remind us that the new movie is coming very, very soon. Today, the studio released a short featurette that shows just how excited director Gareth Edwards is about his new movie, plus some bits of new footage we haven’t seen before.

No Star Wars release is complete without a theatrical poster featuring a mural of disembodied faces all looking in different directions. Artist Drew Struzan made that format into a staple of the theatrical poster world, providing the Star Wars franchise with its most instantly recognizable promotional material, not to mention his fine work for the Indiana Jones and Back to the Future pictures. Those who have been following the long rollout of previews for the upcoming Rogue One: A Star Wars Story will be the first to point out that the production has already taken on its very own face-packed poster back in October. But the people demand more, and as they demand, so shall they receive.