Rogue One’s Opening Crawl Never Made It Into the Script

Rogue One: A Star Wars Story’s first screenwriter, Gary Whitta, wrote an opening crawl, but never included it in the film’s script.

If you felt like Rogue One — a film that included several action sequences, one of Darth Vader’s baddest moments and a CGI Princess Leia — was missing something, it must’ve been an opening crawl. The movie opened on a simple crescendo that only showed the opening title of the film. Honestly, it did fall a little flat. But I forgot about the opening almost immediately as Director Krennic killed Lyra Erso and we met Cassian Andor, a ruthless rebel willing to shoot anyone in a crisis.

Or rather, if commanded to do so.

While the movie could’ve been elevated with an opening, I’m not sure its exclusion hurt the film. It would’ve served as a generous explanation for anyone who couldn’t figure out the timeline of the film, but otherwise, Rogue One‘s story still felt complete.

During his Reddit AMA, director Gareth Edwards said plainly that a Rogue One opening crawl does, in fact, exist. However, since then, Gary Whitta clarified with io9 that this statement isn’t entirely true.

Here’s his explanation:

"“Literally in the very first days working on the film we were asking ourselves those questions. Like ‘What makes these standalones different? Do they have opening crawls? Do they have John Williams music? Or do they have all the same furniture and trappings? Do you do the Kurosawa wipes? Or do find your own language?’Initially Gareth, a hardcore Star Wars fan, was like ‘You’ve gotta have an opening crawl.’ We wanted to have all the things we grew up with. And so as an experiment, purely because it was fun to try and write one, I wrote one. But it was never in a script. It was never actually in a draft.”"

As io9 notes, a lot of things changed from Gary Whitta’s initial draft to Chris Weitz’s secondary iterations. For example, the film didn’t originally include Bodhi Rook or Chirrut Imwe, two characters who gave the film its emotional depth.

Ultimately, everyone decided that new rules needed to be made for the standalones, which means we can assume Han Solo won’t have one either.

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Rogue One will be available for digital download on March 24 and on Blu-ray on April 4.