Star Wars’ Iconic Opening Crawl Is Coming Back, But Only For One Project
The iconic Star Wars opening crawl is back, but only for the upcoming Rey movie.
Have you ever wondered when you first fell in love with that galaxy far, far away created by George Lucas? Even before we were introduced to iconic characters like Luke Skywalker and Han Solo, we were all enchanted by the Star Wars opening crawl. Now, in an interview with Entertainment Weekly, Lucasfilm president Kathleen Kennedy revealed that the crawl would be making a return, but only for the upcoming Star Wars film featuring Daisy Ridley’s Rey.
At this point, we would forgive you for wondering why this announcement about the Star Wars opening crawl is so important. But if you’ll remember, modern Star Wars projects other than the now-infamous Sequel Trilogy (such as Solo: A Star Wars Story and Rogue One: A Star Wars Story) have actually ditched the crawl in favor of jumping right into the action. Right now, it seems like Disney thinks that the crawl needs to be reserved for only certain projects, and Kennedy clarified in the interview that it wouldn’t appear for shows like The Mandalorian because simply put, “the crawl is for movies.”
On paper, we like the idea that the powers that be are treating the Star Wars opening crawl as an important part of the franchise. But in reality, the crawls we have gotten over the decades of Star Wars projects have varied wildly in quality. And you could argue that things started to get bad in 1983 with the release of Return of the Jedi.
For example, the Star Wars opening crawls for the first two movies helped set a dramatic and ominous mood: “it is a period of civil war,” begins A New Hope, and The Empire Strikes Back begins with “it is a dark time for the rebellion.” By comparison, Return of the Jedi begins with “Luke Skywalker has returned to his home planet of Tatooine in an attempt to rescue his friend Han Solo from the clutches of the vile gangster Jabba the Hutt.” In other words, we went from these mythic opening crawls to something that sounded like a description from TV Guide.
The Star Wars opening crawls for the prequels were a bit better than that, though it was pretty weird to see The Phantom Menace crawl talk about “the taxation of trade routes,” and we’re still trying to figure out what the crawl for Revenge of the Sith meant by “there are heroes on both sides.” Maybe if you’re an evil enough servant of the Empire, the youngling-slicing Darth Vader is a hero? At any rate, this is all better than what we got in The Rise of Skywalker, where the first paragraph mentions a “mysterious broadcast” that is actually a Fortnite easter egg (no, really).
Long story not very short; while we’re very excited to see Daisy Ridley return as Rey, we hope that she gets a Star Wars opening crawl worthy of her complex character. No matter how good the crawl or the story is, though, we’re sure that parts of the Star Wars fandom will manufacture reasons to be mad about all of it.
