It’s successors, Quantum of Solace and Skyfall, just tacked on the original style gunbarrel to the end of the movie, which was rather pointless.
Don’t even get me started on that.
When I saw the trailer for TFA where Rey pulled back that small curtain at the beginning, I thought that perhaps that could be the beginning of the movie. The crawl finished and the star field turned out to not be a field of stars at all. I do prefer what we ended up with to that idea though, as the opening Jakku village scene was perhaps the best part of the whole movie.
I don’t think, especially given how they’re running the ST so far, that they’ll ever stray away from the series’ traditions.