Ryan Gosling to lead new Star Wars film with title revealed
By Charlotte McLaughlin, PA Senior Entertainment Reporter
Ryan Gosling has confirmed he will lead a new Star Wars film, with the title of the franchise’s upcoming live-action story revealed.
The new Disney project is set to be released in two years’ time, and will be a “standalone story”, meaning the action will not follow the main storyline of the Skywalker family or sequels starring British actress Daisy Ridley.
Titled Star Wars: Starfighter, the movie comes from Deadpool and Wolverine director Shawn Levy, and is set for a May 7th, 2027, release.
At the Star Wars Celebration in Tokyo, Japan, on Friday, Barbie actor Gosling said: “The reality is that this script is just so good. It has such a great story with great and original characters.
“It’s filled with so much heart and adventure, and there just really is not a more perfect filmmaker for this particular story than Shawn.”
As the event showed his childhood Star Wars bedsheets on screen, Gosling added as “you can see from the picture, I guess I was probably dreaming about Star Wars before I even saw the film.”
“And it’s probably framed my idea of what a movie even was,” he said.
The Canadian actor, who was Oscar-nominated for playing Ken in the Barbie blockbuster, is known for musical La La Land, and romance The Notebook.
Levy said the new space adventure is “not a prequel, not sequel, it’s a new adventure. It’s set in a period of time that we haven’t seen explored yet”.
His previous film Deadpool & Wolverine – starring Ryan Reynolds and Hugh Jackman – was one of the highest-grossing movies of 2024, making more than $1 billion at the box office.
Not much is known about the plot for the new movie from the franchise, who has so far not been as successful with the live action spin-offs, aside from Rogue One: A Star Wars Story starring Diego Luna, compared with the main trilogies.
The next movie release is set to be The Mandalorian And Grogu, a sequel to the Disney+ series The Mandalorian starring Pedro Pascal as a bounty hunter that ends up caring for a force-sensitive creature that resembles the green-skinned Yoda.
The fan event showed footage of Alien actress Sigourney Weaver, as someone who appears to have hired Din Djarin (Pascal), and the appearance of Jeremy Allen White as Rotta the Hutt, the son of slug-like crimelord Jabba the Hutt, a villain from Star Wars: Episode VI – Return of the Jedi.
The film sees The Mandalorian TV series creator Jon Favreau return to direct and produce, alongside Lucasfilm president Kathleen Kennedy and chief content officer Dave Filoni as producers.
The event also confirmed that a new trilogy of Star Wars movies is in “ongoing development” from James Mangold, who was recently nominated for an Oscar for Bob Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown and directed blockbusters Logan and Indiana Jones And The Dial of Destiny, and written by X-Men film franchise writer Simon Kinberg.
Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy, who will direct the upcoming Ridley movie which sees her return as Jedi Knight Rey after the events of 2019’s Star Wars: The Rise Of Skywalker, and What We Do In The Shadows filmmaker Taika Waititi are also part of the project.
Ridley played Rey in 2015’s Star Wars: The Force Awakens and 2017’s Star Wars: The Last Jedi, which saw appearance from original characters Carrie Fisher as Princess Leia, Harrison Ford as Han Solo and Mark Hamill as Luke Skywalker.
They focused on how Leia and Han’s son, Kylo Ren, had been corrupted by the dark side of the force and The First Order supreme leader Snoke as Rey saw her power grow and develop as a Jedi.