There are few combinations of words capable of making an audience sit up quite like "A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away..." You know exactly what's coming next. The music explodes, those enormous yellow letters appear, and everyone suddenly discovers how quickly they can read three paragraphs before they disappear into space. It's been part of Star Wars for almost 50 years, but its future is now considerably more selective.
Lucasfilm President and Chief Creative Officer Dave Filoni has confirmed that the classic Star Wars opening crawl will be reserved for what he calls "Saga-type films," rather than automatically appearing before every theatrical release. That's a notable reversal from former Lucasfilm President Kathleen Kennedy, who said in 2023 that the crawl would return for the franchise's movies. Kennedy stepped down as Lucasfilm president in January 2026, with Filoni taking over creative leadership alongside co-president Lynwen Brennan.
The change has actually already happened. Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu became the franchise's first theatrical movie since The Rise of Skywalker when it arrived in May, but rather than using the traditional crawl, Jon Favreau's (The Mandalorian) movie opens with a short piece of static text providing context for the story, and Lucasfilm is deliberately keeping the traditional crawl for particular types of Star Wars movies:
“It did have a preface… We did a blurb that explains some context. Ahsoka has a version of a crawl, but we put it in red and it’s strictly vertical. It doesn’t go back. So, we find different ways to do it. To me, it’s about capturing the serial vibe and giving a little context, but the classic Star Wars crawl is something that we try to reserve only for Saga-type films.”
It's a big change from what we were told three years ago by Kennedy at Star Wars Celebration in London, back in 2023. When Kennedy announced a new slate of theatrical projects that included movies from Filoni, James Mangold and Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy, she was asked if the crawl would return for the movie based around Rey, to which she responded: "The crawl's coming back. The crawl is for movies."
Is The Star Wars Crawl Gone?
At that time, it felt like Lucasfilm was just establishing a distinction between the TV division and its big screen output. Movies get the crawl, TV doesn't, but now that distinction doesn't seem to exist any more. And as Favreau pointed out, there's already precedent for withholding the crawl, since Rogue One: A Star Wars Story and Solo: A Star Wars Story both opened without one.
"We've only seen the crawl in the Skywalker Saga films. Solo did not have a crawl. Rogue One did not."
Favreau, who saw the original Star Wars theatrically as a child, also explained why he believes keeping the traditional opening relatively rare helps preserve its impact:
“The crawl itself from the original film, I remember being a kid and seeing it with that perspective, ‘cause it was analog, of course. It was on a roller and just the diminishing point of the crawl, that whole first opening sequence, it feels like anecdotally, I understand was added later. That wasn’t even the way it was originally designed. Such an iconic opening. We save it for the Saga.”
Star Wars: Starfighter will arrive in theaters on May 28, 2027. Stay tuned for whether or not this one gets a crawl.
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