If anything about Rogue One: A Star Wars Story stirred up more controversy than ILM’s use of digital effects trickery, it was Lucasfilm’s decision to bypass the traditional opening text crawl in the first spinoff.
Cutting the opening text was seen as the easiest way to accomplish that.
The opening sequence is kind of the crawl of our movie.
Saying that the crawl is very important to millions of fans across the globe, A New Hope crawl designer Dan Perri felt it was “foolish” that Rogue One did not include one.