'I thought, Oh, that's an interesting idea.
It was around that time, while in Sydney working on what everybody believed would be the final film in the franchise, Episode III: Revenge of the Sith, that Knoll first heard that story development had begun on a Star Wars live-action television series. John Knoll, the Industrial Light & Magic executive who first pitched the story that would become Rogue One, came up with the idea for the story during production on Revenge of the Sith, when the aborted live-action series Star Wars: Underworld was still on the table:
A 2016 Vanity Fair article discusses the genesis of Rogue One's story, and casts some serious doubt on this theory:
