Fans have had a field day picking out all the references, easter eggs, and callbacks hidden throughout Rogue One. But for all of the film’s devotion to the original trilogy there was one classic element of Star Wars that was pretty obviously missing; the opening crawl! Rogue One was the first flick set in that galaxy far, far away to not open with a big block of chunky yellow text floating helplessly in the void of space. However, that wasn’t always the case. Director Gareth Edwards recently revealed that the original script for Rogue One did in fact include a crawl, and it wasn’t until a mere six months ago that the higher ups at Disney told him to take it out. This has naturally left all of us opening crawl enthusiasts scratching our heads, wondering what could have been. We may never know the complete answer, but we have a few ideas.

For one thing, we know that most of Cassian and Jyn’s backstory were added in after the reshoots. Apparently the original cut jumped directly from Jyn as a child to her as an adult getting interrogated by the Rebellion. That means a lot of the character building, like her prison escape, was likely covered by the crawl. Same goes for Vader. We may only see him on screen for a few minutes, but the Rogue One team put a lot of thought into his appearance. The original concept was that Vader built his castle on Mustafar to reflect and meditate on his loss there to Obi Wan. We wouldn’t be surprised if the crawl had a line explaining this. Rogue One is also a bridge from the prequels to the original trilogy, so we wonder if the crawl offered a little more connective tissue. It’s not impossible, as we’re clearly seeing the new movies getting slightly more comfortable including some elements from Episodes I, II, and III.

What do you think was in that opening crawl? And was Rogue One better off for not having one? Let us know in the comments.