The Opening Text for Solo: A Star Wars Story is a First for the Franchise

Solo: A Star Wars Story - Lucasfilm and Disney
Solo: A Star Wars Story - Lucasfilm and Disney

Beware of Spoilers for Solo: A Star Wars Story, Ye Who Enter Here

Solo: A Star Wars Story is a unique film in the Star Wars franchise. The first film centered around a single character, setting out to tell an origin story. Yet the film does quite a few things no other Star Wars film has done. One of the many innovations includes the opening text crawl. The Text Crawl is one of the most famous and unique elements of a Star Wars film. So it was significant when Rogue One went without one. That isn’t the case for Solo: A Star Wars Storybut the film does remove the “crawl” portion of the phrase.

The opening of the film is reminiscent of older period films. The text doesn’t crawl, there’s no bombastic reveal of the Star Wars theme. The film begins with this simple text, the first of several screens.

It is a lawless time. CRIME SYNDICATES compete for resources — food, medicine, and HYPERFUEL.

Though the rest of the writing resembles the famous text crawls, with odd phrasing and capitalized words, it’s simply stagnant. The blue text is on a simple black backdrop that fades before being replaced by the next. Considering the fan expectation to hear the most memorable theme of all time, it was surprising to find nothing more than a quiet paragraph. It’s interesting that the filmmakers, be they Phil Lord and Chris Miller or Ron Howard, chose to innovate in this particular avenue.

Star Wars: A New Hope - Opening Text Crawl - Lucasfilm

Star Wars: A New Hope – Opening Text Crawl – Lucasfilm

It almost feels like they forgot to make the text crawl because of the similar writing styles. Or they didn’t want the memorable and noisy Star Wars theme to compete with the film’s opening chase scene for the audience’s attention. Regardless of the reason, this could foreshadow the demise of the Text Crawl. Although it’s more than likely the text crawl wasn’t used because this is not a movie in the main Star Wars trilogies.

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