Here’s One Major Way Rogue One Will Differ From Classic Star Wars Movies

The next movie in the Star Wars canon is going rogue from the classic series in a lot of ways — and not just because it’s called, well, Rogue One. The Disney-backed spinoff is leaving the story of the Skywalker family behind, for starters, instead focusing on a brand-new rebel fighter. It’s depicting events that occur in between the chronology of the original six episodes.

But one of the biggest breaks with tradition, according to Entertainment Weekly, will definitely be the movie’s style. Even the iconic Star Wars opening script crawl, which has been a standard across the trilogies, is still very much up for debate in the new spinoff — and may not make it in.

“The 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,” said Lucasfilm president Kathleen Kennedy. “So we’re right in the middle of talking about that.”

That’s all part of the overall look and feel of the film.

“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,” Kennedy said. “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.”

Despite the violence and warfare present in the original six films (and last year’s Force Awakens), those movies had always been marked by a kind of youthful optimism, peppered with plenty of jokes, slapstick humor and visual gags. But it looks like Rogue One will be doing away with those lighter elements.

“I’d definitely describe it as: It’s got dark tone,” said director Gareth Edwards. “The studio has been very supportive of that.”

So, as the movie undergoes reshoots this summer in preparation for its winter release, fans can at least rest assured that Rogue One is definitely taking itself seriously.