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‘Rogue One: A Star Wars Story’ Opening Scene Different Than Traditional Crawl

By Tony Smejek
Published on: 13:29 PST, Nov 3, 2016

late next month, Rogue One: A Star Wars Story will debut and the tale of those who stole the original Death Star plans will be told. This movie was retroactively mentioned when a “highlighted” paragraph was the main focus of A New Hope in its 1977 opening crawl when viewed at the 2016 Star Wars Celebration panel. Almost 40 years after that, Rogue One will go into detail as we join Jyn Erso and the rest of her group to take on this covert mission.

A source associated with Star War News Net revealed that the prequel movie will open in a fashion “different than the classic Star Wars films.”

Does this mean will it scroll in a different direction or will a non-textual preamble of some sort surprise viewers? In July, ET Online spoke with Lucasfilm president Kathleen Kennedy about an opening crawl in Rogue One: A Star Wars Story. She said that she felt that they had “telegraphed” that already at the Star Wars Celebration event in London.

“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.”

Fans at the Celebration panel were treated with an altered version of A New Hope’s scroll, “telegraphed” to the audience per Kennedy’s reference.

https://youtu.be/-KjKVGVK09U

To make an implication that the tale is already mentioned as a blurb of sorts in the 1977 epic with the alarm sounding off was a slick way to transition into the Rogue One story. A retroactive Easter egg. It was like taking a highlighter and marking an important part of a text book and saying, “We’ll create an epic movie that will tell the tale of this one paragraph.”

The film, directed by Gareth Edwards, has been known for quite some time not to be a traditional Star Wars movie, so by launch date, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that it wouldn’t have the traditional crawl. This was evident in Edward’s statement regarding the anthology movie, while at the same time not revealing much.

“I think basically there’s a lot of things that I probably can’t talk about, is probably the safest way to answer that. The idea is this film is supposed to be different than the saga films…the whole crawl of it all — it’s funny people are fascinated on that.”

Edwards further talked about the Star Wars crawl format saying that if they did do a traditional crawl, it would create yet another movie from there.

In Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, there is still a level of uncertainty on whether or not a crawl will be utilized, but Edwards just tells us to “wait and see,” according to ET Online.

“This film is born out of a crawl. The thing that inspired this movie was a crawl and what was written in that. There’s this feeling that if we did a crawl, then it’ll create another movie. And so the honest answer is you’ll have to wait and see.”

Back in June, Kathleen Kennedy and Gareth Edwards were talking about Rogue One re-shoots and addressed an opening crawl to the movie back then. Kennedy talked about how the crawls were more exclusive to the main saga films while this first Star Wars anthology movie is more of a stand alone.

So even then it was still up for discussion, according to Entertainment Weekly.

“We talk about that all the time. 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. 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.”

What kind of opening format do you think the Rogue One movie will have? Considering that it’s a stand alone movie, do you think subsequent anthology Star Wars movies like the Han Solo film will follow suit? If they impressed the Celebration panel audience in London, could that tease what to expect this December?

The film is directed by Edwards with a screenplay by Chris Weitz and Tony Gilroy. The movie stars Felicity Jones as Jyn Erso, Doctor Strange’s Mads Mikkelsen as Galen Erso, Ben Mendelsohn as Director Orson Krennic, the return of James Earl Jones’ voice as Darth Vader, and a host of others.

Rogue One: A Star Wars Story debuts December 16.

[Featured Image by Ben A. Pruchnie/Getty Images]

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