Rogue One: A Star Wars Story is in the midst of a mild PR nightmare. After news broke that the film was going to receive extensive reshoots due to "poor testing results", Disney has apparently gone on the PR offensive and is currently the focus of an Entertainment Weekly exclusive where the studio has been dishing new details on the movie (including the confirmation of Darth Vader).
One of the things that the company is addressing right now behind the scenes is what exactly a Star Wars story film will look like as opposed to one from the main saga in terms of its style. Disney isn't even sure if they want the traditional opening crawl or not.
Lucasfilm President Kathleen Kennedy told Entertainment Weekly:
“We talk about that all the time. It’s something that we’re right in the midst of discussing even now, so I don’t want to say definitively what we’re doing…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. So we’re right in the middle of talking about that.”
To not have an opening crawl would be a first in pretty much every kind of Star Wars spinoff media ever created, save for most of the now non-canonical novels. Games such as Dark Forces, Starfighter and The Force Unleashed have all used one, so IMO it would be very weird to see a Star Wars movie not have one.
Source: [io9 via Entertainment Weekly]
