Back when STAR WARS: THE FORCE AWAKENS was still in development, BMD claimed that they had details on the opening sequence of the film, which would have followed Luke Skywalker's severed hand holding a lightsaber as it floated through space before landing on the planet Jakku.
Obviously we didn't get that in the movie, but during a conversation with The Sun, Mark Hamill confirmed that it was the original opening scene of Episode VII.
I can tell you now that in the original opening shot of 7, the first thing that came into frame was a hand with a lightsaber, a severed hand that enters the atmosphere, and then the hand and bone burns away and goes sticking into the surface of Jakku, and this alien hand comes in, don’t know if it was Maz but it was an alien hand who takes the light saber way, and then the movie proceeds as you see it.
At the time, I thought that it would have been a pretty cool way to start THE FORCE AWAKENS, but now I'm glad that J.J. Abrams and company decided to go in a different direction for the post-text crawl opening sequence of the film. Which opening scene do you prefer?
Filming is currently underway for the yet-to-be-subtitled STAR WARS: EPISODE VIII, which will arrive in theaters on December 15, 2017.