Reshoots aside, the first Star Wars film to not follow the episode structure Rogue One: A Star Wars Story is currently deep in post-production with the preliminary final cut of the movie expected to be completed soon. Movie fans will know that the process of post-production requires much work including the editing process, visual effects completion and integration, ADR, Foley, scoring and much more. Another part of this process is to determine the opening style of the movie, which for a Star Wars movie would seem predetermined as all of the movies have begun in exactly the same way...
• The Lucasfilm Logo.
• Blue text, reading "A long time ago in a galaxy far, far, away..."
• The yellow outlined Star Wars branding falls before the camera punctuated by the same opening score.
• The yellow text crawl ascending the screen whilst also moving away from the camera and fading into the distance.
• The camera then pans up or down segueing into the movie's opening scene.
Speaking to EW Lucasfilm President Kathleen Kennedy revealed that to differentiate Rogue One from the Saga episodes she and director Gareth Edwards are considering the possibility of not using the iconic crawl...
“The [opening] 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.”
“He [director Gareth Edwards] does a lot of handheld, intimate, close-up work. That’s not something you’ve necessarily seen in a Star Wars movie before. And we brought in [cinematographer] Greig Fraser, to shoot it, who had done Zero Dark Thirty. So a combination of Greig and Gareth…just gives it a really unique style.”
While removing the iconic crawl is an option Kennedy should also remember that other forms of Star Wars such as fan films and video games have also used the crawl and simply not included the episode reference, thus eliminating the need to call Rogue One Episode 3.5 or 3.75
