Each film in the Star Wars series opens with an crawl (also known as a roll-up) of text which provides an explanation of the backstory and context of the film. The crawl has become associated with the films and has frequently been parodied.

The opening of each film begins with the text "A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away....", followed by the Star Wars logo over a field of stars. The logo then moves away from the camera and subsequently, the crawl begins. Scrolling from the bottom of the screen towards a vanishing point at the horizontal center and above the vertical centre of the screen in a perspective projection. When the crawl has nearly reached the vanishing point, the crawl is faded out, and the camera pans down through space to a ship or planet Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace DVD commentary (except in Episode II, where the camera pans up).

The crawl begins with film's episode number and subtitle (except in the original release of Episode IV - see below) followed by a three-paragraph summary of the events immediately prior to the events of the film. Each title crawl ends with a four-dot ellipsis except for Episode VI which has a three-dot ellipsis.

Two typefaces are used in the crawls, both in yellow: News Gothic bold for the episode number and main body of the crawl, and Univers light ultra condensed for the title of the film. Several words are in all-capital letters to stress their importance: "DEATH STAR" in A New Hope, "GALACTIC EMPIRE" in Return of the Jedi, and "ARMY OF THE REPUBLIC" in Attack of the Clones). Each line of the crawl spans the width of the screen when it enters from the bottom. In the fullscreen pan and scan versions of the films, the full lines of text are cut off on the sides until they have scrolled further onto the screen.