The 2026 movie schedule has something we haven’t seen in a long time. It’s been over five years since The Rise of Skywalker became the last Star Wars movie to be on the big screen. This year, we will get The Mandalorian and Grogu, bringing the franchise’s small-screen hit to theaters, but that's not the only upcoming Star Wars movie. A year later, we’ll actually get another big-screen Star Wars adventure in Star Wars: Starfighter.
The latter film will star Ryan Gosling and is directed by Shawn Levy. Levy just officially wrapped one major franchise, as a producer/director of Stranger Things, and he recently told THR that the Netflix series helped prepare him for directing the movie in a galaxy far, far away. It showed him that, as big as a movie might feel, what’s important to a story is often quite small. He explained….
If I’ve learned anything on Stranger Things, it’s that you can get intimidated by the scale of franchise expectation. But you will lose your way if that’s your focus. I’ve learned the need to stay rooted in character, and themes and relationships on screen. Yes, there’s spectacle and scale, just like Stranger Things. And of course, Star Wars and Starfighter has spectacle and scale and adventure at a level I’ve never done in my whole career. But like Stranger Things, it’s also very much anchored in a human scale character-sized story. I think that if I can balance the epic and the intimate the way the Duffers have with Stranger Things, I’ll make a movie and an original and new Star Wars adventure that can be really satisfying to fans and audiences.
Even though we haven’t seen Star Wars on the big screen in quite some time, despite numerous attempts to get Star Wars movies made, you’d still have to call it one of the biggest franchises ever. It’s not hard to imagine a director becoming at least a bit intimidated by it all. There are expectations both on the fan side (that the movie will live up to some of the biggest blockbusters ever mad) and likely a lot of expectations on the other side as well. Specifically, that the movie will be a big hit and bring in a lot of box office money.
One thing that might be working in Shawn Levy’s favor here is that Star Wars: Starfighter is going to be something unlike any Star Wars movie we’ve seen so far. It won’t have three seasons of television that preceded it, and as far as we’re aware, it’s not connected to the massive big-screen franchise beyond taking place in the same universe. It’s a completely standalone entry with new characters and an original story.
That at least has the potential to allow Levy to not consider the massive scale of the franchise in the same way that another Star Wars movie, like the planned new Daisy Ridley film that will continue the story of Rey, will have to do. At the same time, in both cases, Levy is almost certainly correct that the “human scale’ of the movie is what’s important. If the movie tells a compelling story with equally compelling characters, fans will likely enjoy it.
