The past decade-plus has seen a lot of familiar names tapped to helm Star Wars movies which have subsequently disappeared into vaporware. Those familiar names have ranged from The Last Jedi and Knives Out writer-director Rian Johnson to Thor: Ragnarok director Taika Waititi to Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige to The Lego Movie’s Phil Lord and Christopher Miller to Game of Thrones showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss. So it’s easy to be a bit cynical about new Star Wars movie announcements. Still, the latest one on the docket sounds promising enough to get people’s hopes up all over again.
Titled Star Wars: Starfighter and scheduled for release on May 28, 2027 — the same week as the 50th anniversary of the original 1977 Star Wars (subsequently officially retitled Star Wars: Episode IV — A New Hope), the project was announced at the annual Star Wars Celebration, held this year in Chiba, Japan. Deadpool & Wolverine and Free Guy director Sean Levy will helm the project, with Ryan Gosling starring.
Details on the planned movie were minimal, but a presentation hosted by Lucasfilm president Kathleen Kennedy and chief creative officer Dave Filoni revealed that Starfighter is scheduled to enter production in fall 2025, and will take place about five years after the events in 2019’s Star Wars: Episode IX – The Rise of Skywalker, the movie that completed George Lucas’ original planned nine-film series. A press release described it as “an entirely new adventure featuring all-new characters set in a period of time that has not been explored on screen yet.”
That suggests the movie won’t be connected to the 2001 game Star Wars: Starfighter, a flight sim set just before the Battle of Naboo, during the action of Star Wars: Episode I — The Phantom Menace.
The idea of Star Wars moving beyond the Skywalker Saga is guaranteed to be divisive among fans, just like every other theatrical project in the franchise that’s tried to step away from characters established in Lucas’ original trilogy. But the choice to finally move Star Wars forward in time, rather than continuing to explore different pockets of the established nine-film timeline with prequels and sidequels, should give Levy and his team a freedom that Star Wars creators don’t often have.
And the accelerated timeline is a good sign that Starfighter might actually see release, unlike the various projects above, seemingly all announced as soon as the contracts were signed, and before any significant story development had taken place. We’ll have more when Lucasfilm announces further details about the project.
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