Ryan Gosling has the high ground. Lucasfilm confirms that the star will lead a new “Star Wars” installment, titled “Star Wars: Starfighter,” with Shawn Levy directing. The film is eyeing a fall production start and Disney has set a theatrical release date of May 28, 2027.
After numerous reports on Gosling and Levy’s attachment to a “Star Wars” project, Lucasfilm president Kathleen Kennedy and chief creative officer Dave Filoni officially unveiled plans for “Starfighter” on Friday morning at the banner’s annual Star Wars Celebration event in Tokyo.
Gosling and Levy also appeared at the livestreamed event to further tease the project, with Gosling wearing a cap reading, “Never tell me the odds.”
“Being here and seeing all of you [makes it] more inspiring to do it. There’s so much creativity and imagination in this room and there’s so much love. It’s such a great reminder of how much movies can mean to us, specifically how much these movies mean to us,” Gosling told the screaming audience at the end of the presentation. “The force is a mysterious thing, but, as I’m here, the force is the fans. All we can hope for is, ‘May the fans be with us.’”
“We’re fans too,” Levy said. “There’s obviously a relationship between these stories and the audience, but we’ve spent our lives in that audience. We know how meaningful it is.”
The standalone, which focuses on new characters in the “Star Wars” universe, is set roughly five years after the events of “Star Wars: Episode IX — The Rise of Skywalker,” which concluded the Skywalker saga and currently stands as the final feature chronologically on the “Star Wars” timeline. No other casting details were announced.
The project marks Levy’s directorial follow-up to Marvel Studios’ megasmash buddy comedy “Deadpool & Wolverine,” which raked in $1.3 billion at the global box office after releasing in July 2024 and stands as the highest-grossing R-rated feature of all-time. Gosling was last seen in the action-heavy romcom “The Fall Guy,” released in May 2024. “Starfighter” is a new leap for the typically franchise-averse actor, whose few encounters with IP (“Barbie,” “Blade Runner 2049”) have had less of a track record with filmgoing audiences than the omnipresent (and superlatively lucrative) “Star Wars” franchise.
“Starfighter” will release just over a year after the next “Star Wars” theatrical feature, “The Mandalorian & Grogu.” That film, a theatrical expansion of the Disney+ series “The Mandalorian,” has already completed principal photography and will release to theaters on May 22, 2026. It will mark the first “Star Wars” feature since “The Rise of Skywalker” debuted in December 2019.
