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‘Rouge One’ is trending because ‘Star Wars’ fans can’t spell

The typo still makes a movie we'd want to see.

Photo of Michelle Jaworski 

Michelle Jaworski

Internet Culture

Posted on Apr 7, 2016   Updated on May 26, 2021, 11:40 pm CDT

The excitement for Rogue One: A Star Wars Story is in hyperdrive following the release of its initial trailer, but our first big real reveal since the cast photo last August has also led to some amusing typos.

Although we’re only starting to wind down from The Force Awakens, many fans are already on board with Felicity Jones’s Jyn Erso, the return of Mon Mothma, and appearances from Diego Luna, Forest Whitaker, Donnie Yen, and Ben Mendelsohn in a jam-packed teaser bursting with goodies for Star Wars fans to dissect for months to come.

Go ahead, watch it again. We’ll wait.

Trouble is, when some fans went to tweet about the movie, they typed in “Rouge One” instead of Rogue One. The Rogue–Rouge mixup is understandable, considering it’s just the transposition of two letters, but it’s unclear how many instances were simply excitement-based typos or whether most people believe that’s how “rogue” is spelled.

https://twitter.com/misterpatches/status/718046301573758976

https://twitter.com/pettygyaI/status/718046099114704896

Writers foresaw the problem, probably because they’d already made the mistake themselves while writing Rogue One articles.

https://twitter.com/amy_geek/status/718037295115296770

https://twitter.com/dr_teng/status/718079134178607104

Because Star Wars takes over the Internet whenever there’s a new trailer, enough people were tweeting about Rouge One that it ended up trending below #RogueOne. The movie is getting so much hype that even spellcheck can’t even stop the typo from climbing to the top of people’s feeds.

https://twitter.com/my_name_is_jim/status/718050322854387712

As more people started to notice “Rouge One” trending, instead of correcting grammar or making fun of the people who got the title wrong, they started getting creative and ran with a “Rouge One” movie.

The word “rouge” can mean a couple of things. Most often, it refers to a red powder or cream used as makeup, though it can also refer to a type of point awarded in Canadian football. It’s the former definition that many fans jumped on as they imagined just what Rouge One would be like (but the latter wasn’t completely ignored, either).

Least of all, Star Wars definitely has the name of its next makeup line right there.

https://twitter.com/sarahw/status/718066199855251456

https://twitter.com/MaxRenn/status/718064324384829440

https://twitter.com/EvilGalProds/status/718076169145466881

The spelling snafu also offered a connection to Moulin Rouge, which happens to star Ewan McGregor, the prequel trilogy’s Obi-Wan Kenobi. That’s totally what he was doing while in self-exile on Tatooine, right?

https://twitter.com/10problematic/status/718056700176011264

https://twitter.com/TVMcGee/status/718048971181187076

We have eight months to perfect our puns, because this will probably happen every time Rogue One makes headlines from now until December.

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*First Published: Apr 7, 2016, 1:18 pm CDT

Michelle Jaworski

Michelle Jaworski is a staff writer and TV/film critic at the Daily Dot. She covers entertainment, geek culture, and pop culture and has covered everything from the Sundance Film Festival, NYFF, and Tribeca to New York Comic Con and Con of Thrones. She is based in Brooklyn.

Michelle Jaworski