Opening Credits

Opening Credits are, as the name implies, the cast and crew credits that run at the opening of a TV show, film, or video game.

For the longest time, they included the work's title and the names of the principal actors. Films would also include the names of the principal crew members, especially the director. Ending credits, if they existed at all, simply recapped the opening credits.

Then Walt Disney decided that Fantasia didn't need opening credits at all — even the film's title card wasn't displayed until the intermission.

Overall, credits ended up migrating from the start of the film (or television show) to the end, leaving the opening credits for what the works' producers consider to be the important information: the title, the stars' names, the name of the director, and occasionally the soundtrack composer's name. If the original creators are sufficiently famous, they're likely to get listed in the opening credits In Case You Forgot Who Wrote It.

A few films went in the other direction, inter-cutting the opening credits with the first scenes of the movie. The credits for the 1968 Spaghetti Western Once Upon a Time in the West take fourteen minutes to finish, and the opening credits of 1993's version of The Fugitive don't finish until fifteen minutes into the film.

With the advent of streaming services, where people have already seen the important information before the first instalment starts streaming, credits have become less important all around.

Variations

Citizen Kane, released in 1941, started with only the Title Sequence with no opening credits. That option remains a rare choice, and tends to show up in genre films when it shows up at all — 2001: A Space Odyssey, The Godfather, and The Empire Strikes Back are all examples.

Painting the Medium applies to the credits as much as it does to the rest of the work. The 1961 version of West Side Story shows images of New York City while an overture plays before the title card, saving the credits for the end of the movie and showing them as graffiti. Fahrenheit 451, set In a World without written text, has spoken credits.

Anime and Western Animation television series still use long opening credits even in the 2020s, presumably in order to reduce how much original animation needs to be created for each episode.

Live-Action TV series with ensemble casts sometimes credit all of the actors in the ensemble, even for episodes where not everyone appears. Other ensemble shows, such as "Anglo school" Soap Operas, don't credit any of the actors in the opening credits. In both cases, it's less expensive to make a single opening credit sequence than it is to customize the credits for each episode.

Whooshing Credits have their own page.