When people first sat down to Star Wars in 1977, they were greeted with what would become two iconic cinematic tropes: John Williams’ epic score and exposition through yellow crawling text. News of Michael Giacchino scoring Rogue One: A Star Wars Story meant the first trope wouldn’t be part of the universe’s first spin-off film, and now we’ve learned the second one won’t be either.
In a new interview with Variety, Lucasfilm head Kathleen Kennedy said the anthology film “most likely” won’t open with the familiar crawl. “We felt that’s so indicative of what those saga films are,” Kennedy said. “Initially, we probably will begin the film in a way that is traditional, with just the title.”
Kennedy went on to talk about the upcoming Han Solo origin film starring Alden Ehrenreich as a young Solo and Donald Glover as his buddy Lando Calrissian, with Phil Lord and Chris Miller directing. “This moves closer to a heist or Western type feel,” Kennedy explained. “We’ve talked about [Frederic] Remington and those primary colors that are used in his paintings defining the look and feel of the film.”
While most of the Star Wars films on the Disney/Lucasfilm slate have directors attached, Kennedy noted that they’ve made finding a female director a top priority for a future film. The challenge is finding someone who’s both early in their career yet has the proper kind of experience. “We want to make sure that when we bring a female director in to do Star Wars, they’re set up for success. They’re gigantic films, and you can’t come into them with essentially no experience,” Kennedy said, specifying, “We want to really start to focus in on people we would love to work with and see what kinds of things they’re doing to progress up that ladder now, and then pull them in when the time is right.”
Rogue One, sans crawl, is out in theaters December 16th. It stars Felicity Jones, Diego Luna, Riz Ahmed, Ben Mendelsohn, Donnie Yen, Jiang Wen, Forest Whitaker, Mads Mikkelsen, Neil Breen, and Alan Tudyk. Gareth Edwards serves as director.
