Turns out, “Rogue One” WAS supposed to have an opening crawl
The history books will remember Rogue One as the first stand-alone Star Wars story that made a bazillion dollars (okay, okay, fine it’s just shy of $500 million right now). It will also remember the movie for what is, undoubtedly, the most talked about Star Wars movie — if only because of everything that happened behind-the-scenes with Rogue One.
The movie has been out for three weeks now, maybe you’ve seen it three times, and we’re still talking about what COULD have been. Today’s latest revelation: Rogue One originally had an opening crawl.
Shortly before the movie was released in theaters, word got out that Lucasfilm and Disney were considering not including an opening crawl for the movie. The reason was that this wasn’t part of the ~saga~ films, and that the jumping-off point for the action didn’t necessarily need explanation. This isn’t like A New Hope when you’re dropped into a space battle like “what the heck is going on??”
Since Rogue One’s release, fans have actually made Rogue One a crawl, and the original designer of the crawl has voiced his displeasure at its omission. And now, adding one more thing to this Rogue-One-Crawl-Saga, the film was initially supposed to include it.
Talking to Empire, Rogue One’s director, Gareth Edwards, confessed that the first draft of the script included a crawl — and yeah, he was pretty bummed to lose it, too.
"The first screenplay that Gary Whitta wrote had a crawl in it – and you learn doing that that 'a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away' has four dots in it, not three," he explains. Also, good to know. "And then at some point, probably like six months before we were filming, we were in a meeting, and they talked about not having an opening crawl, because these are standalone films, not part of the sagas. If I'm honest, there was an initial kind of like, 'whaaaa? I want the crawl!'"
But, Edwards understood the studio’s reason for nixing it.
The opening sequence is kind of the crawl of our movie. It's like the setup. And our film is also born out of a crawl – the reason we exist is because of a previous crawl, so it feels like this infinite loop that will never end. It's a small thing to give up to get to do Star Wars.
Yeah, agreed, small price to pay to get to, you know, bring Darth Vader back to the big screen. We’d say this was a fair trade — even though we’re going to speculate about what the Rogue One opening crawl *might* have said for the rest of our lives.
