Gareth Edwards’s upcoming standalone Star Wars movie Rogue One is supposed to offer up its own take on the beloved saga, but fans have been debating what, if anything, will connect the movie to the main episodes of the series. Speculation has run rampant about whether or not we’ll get to see an opening crawl summary at the outset of Rogue One, but it looks like it’ll be the first Star Wars movie without it.
The folks at Star Wars News Net have gotten word from their Bothan spy sources that the brain trust at Lucasfilm has definitely decided to ditch the iconic opening altogether and break from tradition. This should be good news to fans willing to let the standalone movies do exactly that.
The tone of Rogue One has always seemed different from the elaborate space opera of the main episodes, and the trailers have driven home the idea that it will be a more realistic sci-fi war film. Letting the opening crawl go is the first step in letting Rogue One have some breaking room to be different.
Plus if it did have an opening crawl wouldn’t it generally say the same thing that the opening crawl in A New Hope — which birthed the idea for Rogue One in the first place — had to say? The Empire rules the galaxy, there’s a band of Rebels trying to break it up, and there you go. There’s no need to be redundant if the movie does its job right.
Lucasfilm president Kathleen Kennedy has been surprisingly vocal about the willingness for these anthology movies to be different, and specifically with details synonymous with the Star Wars brand.
In June Kennedy 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.
And then in July at Star Wars Celebration she seems to confirm that fact even further:
You know, we’re in the midst of talking about it, but I don’t think these films will have an opening crawl. I think that’s what we kind of telegraphed at the beginning of the event today.
With a month to go before Rogue One hits theaters decisions like that had to be set in stone. We’ve already said our peace about how Rogue One doesn’t need the iconic opening crawl, and the only question that needs to be answered now is whether it will still start with the “A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away…” credit or not just to appease the die-hard fans.
