Kathleen Kennedy was talking to Entertainment Weekly at Star Wars Celebration 2023 in London, and they asked if we would see the Star Wars Crawl on the Rey movie, since Rey is now a Skywalker, and she replied that “the crawl’s coming back.”
EW asked if that was just for the Rey movie, to which she responded “No. The crawl is for movies.”
What this means is, while the animated and live-action TV series will not have a crawl, the feature films will.
This makes sense to me as a way to differentiate the features from the series. Personally, I feel like both Rogue One and Solo should have had crawls at the start. It was a conscious decision that they would not, at the time, because they weren’t part of the Skywalker Saga. Now that time has passed, it seems they’ve re-thought that decision. I think this is a very good call, and I think they should go a step further, and go back to both Rogue One and Solo and add the missing crawl to both of them. I know they have a crawl, already written, for Rogue One, as Gary Whitta had one in his script for the film. Not sure about Solo, but it wouldn’t be too hard to come up with something for that film as well.
I know that it’s messing with history to put a crawl on those films, but it’s not the first time that revisions have happened with Star Wars films. I think George Lucas continued editing all of his films except for Revenge of the Sith after release. From the Star Wars Trilogy Special Editions to The Phantom Menace and Attack of the Clones. The Phantom Menace had the Yoda puppet replaced with a digital version of the character that looked like he did in both follow-ups, as well as additional material added to the podrace. Attack of the Clones had some minor dialog additions that I remember noticing when I got the movie. In particular, after Anakin returns from attempting to rescue his mother, the theatrical version did not have Padme sit down with him to try to console him. And Lucas was still editing the Original Trilogy up until the sale of Lucasfilm to Disney, adding blinks to the Ewoks, and the now infamous “maclunky.”
Given all of that, perhaps it’s time to add the crawl to those two films, as we wait for more films that will also have crawls of their own. The crawl is, honestly, a perfect way to get up-to-speed with what you need to know going into the adventure. Everyone starts on the same page.
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