Rogue One: A Star Wars Story May Not Have Opening Crawl

For faithful Star Wars fans, they might find that one of the franchise’s most iconic elements is [...]

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For faithful Star Wars fans, they might find that one of the franchise's most iconic elements is missing in its upcoming standalone film, Rogue One: A Star Wars Story.

Fans began worrying over the film when news broke that Rogue One would be undergoing reshoots before its final edit was locked in. Fans were understandably concerned that these reshoots signaled larger problems with the solo film. Those fears, however, have been pacified several times over by Rogue One's director Gareth Edwards, since they were planned from the start, and were about refining the story, not drastically changing it. But, now, an even bigger threat has emerged which stands to alienate Star Wars fans.

In an interview with Entertainment Weekly, Lucasfilm president Kathleen Kennedy weighed in on Rogue One's production, admitting that the film's team is still struggling to decide whether or not Rogue One should include Star War's famous opening crawl that fans expect to see - after all, the entire story takes place in the opening crawl of the first film. In fact, Kennedy said the team is really debating what traditional Star Wars tropes, if any, should feature in the upcoming film as the project aims to distance itself from the franchise's saga.

"We talk about that all the time," she said. "It's something that we're right in the midst of discussing even now, so I don't want to say definitively what we're doing," she said. "The crawl and some of those elements live so specifically within the 'saga' films that we are having a lot of discussion about what will define the [stand-alone] Star Wars Stories separate and apart from the saga films. So we're right in the middle of talking about that."

Whatever decision the team makes will likely set a precedent for future Star Wars standalone films. Looking to 2018, fans are already anticipating the release of a still unnamed standalone which will focus on the adventures of a young Han Solo and tell the story of how he came to join the Rebellion.

For now, both Edwards and Kennedy want to assure fans that Rogue One will honor Star Wars' rich history. However, they do want fans to be know that the standalone films will differ from the franchise's previous titles. Kennedy emphasized this by saying that, "One of the things we're doing with these Star Wars stories is embracing the uniqueness of the different genres, and we're very deliberately leaning into the various styles of directors that we're approaching so that each of these movies will very intentionally have a very different tone and style from the saga films."

Rogue One: A Star Wars Story will hit theaters on December 16, 2016. Visit our Rogue One hub for all the latest on the film.

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