#2 The Music
This is hands down the biggest of them all and two sided. Are future movies going to have scores? DUH! Will they be good? Probably. But will they be what we’ve grown up with? That answer is no. With the wrapping of episode IX, the Star Wars career (and possibly total career) of the great master John Williams will come to a close. Other awesome composers will step up, but they won’t be John Williams. He truly is the Mozart of our time.
Not only that but watch all the movies. The trilogies all have the John Williams traditional Star Wars opening. Both Rogue One and Solo: A Star Wars Story do not open to John William’s opening. They are both also scored by new composers. The themes for all the characters, minus Sith, are derivations of that score. The themes are sped up, slowed down or altered slightly. If you Don’t have the main theme you can’t even have character themes. No future film will ever start with that single giant note that stands hairs on end.
#1 The Crawl
The music plays directly into this one. Lucasfilm specifically stated that they would use the opening crawl for the saga films only. All other films would have different, more traditional openings. I did not have a problem with this when the plan was to do both anthologies and saga films, but with the saga ending, the opening crawl is a HUGE part of Star Wars that will never be seen again on the big screen. The music and crawl are the biggest signatures of the Star Wars franchise. I really hope that they rethink this one. Trilogies and grouped movies could maybe use it, while any anthologies would go without. It was such a unique way to introduce the overall setting and get some backstory in front of viewers without using heavy exposition scenes.
Of course nothing is final and Lucasfilm could reverse course on most of these, but until we hear otherwise, when the closing credits role we will never see any of these things again on the big screen.