Rogue One and Other Star Wars Story Movies Probably Won’t Have Opening Crawls

When Rogue One: A Star Wars Story kicked off its feature panel at Star Wars Celebration last weekend, they showed the opening crawl of Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope, as this movie takes place inside those very words. As it passed the words “DEATH STAR,” covering Rogue One‘s plot, the crawl abruptly stopped, started to tune out as if a failed transmission, and we heard frantic radio chatter from the Rebellion instead (you can see part of it in the video above). That was all indicative of the fact that this movie, and the other “Star Wars Story” films like it, probably won’t have a crawl, the first Star Wars films to do so.

“We’re still talking about it, but I don’t think these films will have an opening crawl,” Lucasfilm president Kathleen Kennedy told Entertainment Tonight after the panel. “I think that that’s what we kind of telegraphed at the beginning of the event today.

While director Gareth Edwards would eventually say “you’ll have to wait and see,” he did give some reasoning for why there likely won’t be a crawl.

“This film is born out of a crawl. The thing that inspired us was a crawl and what was written in that, so if we did a crawl, that’d be another movie,” he said with a laugh, the implication of it being a never-ending loop.

Regardless, a new version of introduction for these films would help to differentiate them from the Saga films (the ones with Episode numbers). While several videogames have used opening crawls, there are examples out there, including games and the TV series Star Wars: The Clone Wars and Star Wars Rebels, that have used a different approach. We’ll find out for sure which way Rogue One, and likely the other Star Wars Story films in the future go on December 16, 2016.