I wanted to get some thoughts from people regarding a slightly more radical edit idea for Revenge of the Sith.

VegetableMan brought up this idea, that may have been briefly suggested before, to have Anakin’s mission to Mustafar be to hunt down a group of surviving Jedi rather than the remaining Separatists leaders. There’s a few reasons why I think this could benefit the film, but mainly I think it would be a way for the audience to actually see Darth Vader “help the Empire hunt down and destroy the Jedi Knights”.

First of all, who would be interested in an edit like this? You don’t have to read anything else, at the very least I would appreciate on hearing your interest in this!

I’m just going to try and quickly outline the necessary changes to make this work, or at least my interpretation:

Cut General Grievous’ line about sending the Separatists leaders to Mustafar and “your ship awaits”. This way, it just seems like he is having a meeting with the leaders about keeping them safe, and then dismissed them from the meeting. Now, we can assume the leaders just get captured by the Clones a few minutes later. That ends the Separatist plot.
Cut Sidious telling Anakin to “go to the Mustafar system” and wipe out the Separatist leaders.
Somewhere between that scene and when Anakin meets Padmé, reuse the scene of Anakin contacting Palpatine from Mustafar through hologram for a new scene where a Republic/Imperial Officer contacts Palpatine to inform him that a group of Jedi have been spotted on Mustafar. Something along those lines. Now the audience knows, and Sidious just relays this info to Anakin offscreen.
When Anakin sees Padmé after the attack, cut Anakin dialogue to say something like, “The Chancellor has given me a very important mission- on the Mustafar system”. Anakin still needs to tell Padmé he is going to Mustafar, but we need to remove mention of the Separatists. You could even make it “Jedi have gathered on the Mustafar system”, but that might be too much info to give Padmé at this point.
Biggest thing, cut/replace all shots of the Separatists leaders on Mustafar with new shots of Jedi.

I wanted to quickly touch on what would be needed to do this:

You need Jedi costumes and actors, maybe around 5. As well as an Imperial/Republic Officer costume/extra.
You would need an Anakin outfit and body double who will be concealed by a hood. Maybe not the whole outfit, but at least a robe, a glove and Anakin’s lightsaber.
You would need to shoot various standing, fighting, dead body shots in front of a green screen. I know that I personally have access to a studio location where these can be shot. Alternatively, if each person had their own green screen they could shoot in front of, simple shots possibly could be stitched together usings quick cuts and limited movement. Anakin could be shot last in an attempt to match some of them.
New green screen plates would need to be made of the Mustafar “war room”.

While I know the new shoots are at least theoretically possible, I feel like one of the harder things for it would be to make new plates of the war room itself. I think it would be a bit of work to remove the Separatists from a lot of those shots, since a lot of them move quite a bit. I was thinking that maybe later shots of the room when it is empty, and when Anakin/Obi-Wan fight through it, could be used instead to create bits and pieces of empty backgrounds for that sequence. Not only that, but even if you were to make some usable stills, you still have to worry about the motion graphics on the screens as well as the hologram tables.

I personally think this would be the biggest challenge. If I had to guess, you’re talking about plates for an estimated screentime of about 30-seconds to 1 minute, based off cutting to how this movie currently is. Maybe you could make it shorter. That isn’t including shots of their dead bodies, but that would be a matter of throwing Jedi bodies on top of theirs, and erasing whatever is left.

The only alternative I could think of would be if a model of the room could be remade using something like Unreal Engine (or we just had Anakin turn off the lights before the fight starts!)

I would like to know how reasonable these ideas are, and what direction you think we should approach it at. This is especially geared toward people who are kinda vfx savvy.

And again, would love to hear who all would be interested in seeing something like this. I do think this could be possible, but for all the necessary planning, it would be nice to know how others felt about it. Because if people don’t think it is a good idea, it probably won’t be worth the trouble.