Thanks for all the input in the thread. It seems many are keen for one 2:45 movie and two 2-ish hour movies.

I’ve spent that last week taking a deep dive into the second half of the season to see how the two scenarios play out against my core aims for the edits.

Overall neither option offers a perfect solution, but my feeling is that the two-movie option works best. There really isn’t enough material in those last two arcs to produce two movies, particularly the final arc, which is mostly setup for Rogue One.

I have done a rough cut of the last two arcs and it comes in at 2h46…. Almost identical to my cut of the first two arcs and it works really well. There will be some decisions that people don’t agree with, but in order to give Andor the cinematic climax it deserves, some good material will need to go.

The second movie will have a 4-act structure:

Gorman Massacre
Mothma Extraction
Luthen’s Death
Kleya Rescue & Rogue One setup

In order to hit the ground running like a Star Wars Movie should, we open on Yavin to show that the state of the Rebellion, but I’ve very much streamlined the pre-massacre stuff to get to the action as quickly as possible. A lot of episode 7 has been removed.

The massacre plays out with some tightening of the story, so most of episode 8 is retained.

The start of episode 9 is rearranged, to move Cassian’s scenes back slightly…… he needs time to get from Gorman to Coruscant.

The opening scenes of episode 10
are intercut with the last few scenes of episode 9 to hide the time skip. I’ve also removed any direct and indirect references to time including editing K2’s interactions with Mekshi and Cassian.

The Kleya/Luthen flashbacks have been removed. They are great scenes, but ultimately uneccessary and very much kill the pacing.

Episodes 11 and 12 play out in order. I have trimmed and removed quite a lot from the final scenes on Yavin to keep focus on the main characters and the lead in to Rogue One.