Or Lucasfilm didn’t approve of.

Fairly enough, he introduced all the bullshit in his mystery box and left it for another guy to follow through. Now he has to finish what he started. He had it coming.

They need to address the Leia problem and the most innocuous way to do this is for her to die off-screen. That means a time jump of at least a year. The Resistance sent out an SOS and needs to rebuild. No better way to introduce Lando than one of the key backers of the resistance.

The opening crawl is only around 5-8 lines of a single paragraph—split into three in the actual film. There’s plenty of stuff they can explain as VII focused highly on Rey in the last minutes of the movie.