Shawn Levy’s Star Wars: Starfighter is happening. No, really. Despite what purveyors of chronic online skepticism peddle, Lucasfilm is making a new Star Wars movie that is neither a (direct) sequel to the Skywalker Saga, nor a spinoff of The Mandalorian. And it’s now got the cast to prove it.The last 24 hours has indeed been a flurry of announcements, with Disney and Lucasfilm revealing that in addition to the already-attached Ryan Gosling, Star Wars: Starfighter is adding Aaron Pierre—the breakout charisma factory in Rebel Ridge—to its cast, as well as Amy Adams and newcomer child actor Flynn Gray. The casting of Gray is of particular importance, with THR reporting that he was tested alongside Gosling, as well as Adams who (unfortunately) seems to have been cast in the mother role yet again with this film. All of the above also are joining a cast that also includes House of the Dragon’s Matt Smith and Pearl’s Mia Goth.cnx.cmd.push(function() {cnx({playerId: "106e33c0-3911-473c-b599-b1426db57530",}).render("0270c398a82f44f49c23c16122516796");});The casting news unto itself is a big step forward for Lucasfilm, which has struggled to get a theatrical Star Wars movie off the ground in the six years since 2019’s Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker. While The Mandalorian and Grogu film is in production and expected to arrive in May 2026, that film is essentially a feature-length spinoff (and perhaps finale?) to Disney+’s still most successful Star Wars TV series. Conversely, Starfighter is a production and narrative designed from the ground up to be a standalone moviegoing experience, in this case with a screenplay by Jonathan Tropper (The Adam Project).There are of course plenty of opportunity to be cynical about the announcement. Lucasfilm has, again, notoriously struggled to get a new Star Wars movie off the ground for more than half a decade, with various productions like a Star Wars movie from Game of Thrones creators David Benioff and D.B. Weiss, or Patty Jenkins’ Rogue Squadron, being announced with great fanfare and then quietly canceled a year or two later. Furthermore, Levy is a director far more associated with crowd-pleasing studio products—think Night at the Museum, Free Guy, or Deadpool & Wolverine—than ambitious big swings.And yet, we’d suggest there is a real opportunity with Star Wars: Starfighter, the likes of which we have not seen in the 10 years since J.J. Abrams rebooted the Star Wars franchise on the big screen with The Force Awakens. Which is reason enough to keep an open mind.When Abrams was given proverbial free reign of the galaxy far, far away back in 2013, he at least had on paper what seemed like a clean slate. While the previous decade’s Prequel Trilogy was successful, those films were by no means loved and celebrated by fandom or casual moviegoers (sounds familiar?). So while there was both trepidation about someone other than George Lucas spearheading a Star Wars movie, there was at least cautious optimism among fans to get something different. But by “different,” we of course mean what turned out to be an excessively nostalgic throwback to the original 1977 Star Wars movies (others might call it an outright remake by another name).But given the expectations of fandom to see old favorites like Harrison Ford’s Han Solo again—plus Disney’s own actual expectations for harvesting their new acquisition—it might be somewhat unfair to suggest Abrams really was free to tell whatever story he wanted. Comic-Con attendees, wistful grandparents, and most importantly Mouse House shareholders demanded an Episode VII, and Abrams and an army of co-writers and filmmakers gave them exactly that. And at least a decade ago, everyone seemed pretty happy with the results at first.However, every Disney-produced Star Wars movie that came after The Force Awakens found itself trapped in a similar box which Abrams and Lucasfilm president Kathleen Kennedy had set for themselves: how do we again recycle the past while changing just enough of it to justify creating a “new film?”The following four Star Wars flicks had varying levels of success with solving this conundrum. For our money, Rogue One: A Star Wars Story might have been the most credible with director Gareth Edwards, and perhaps more importantly screenwriter and reshoot mastermind Tony Gilroy, turning Rogue into a veritable World War II melodrama about self-sacrifice and the cost of resisting an occupying or autocratic force. Still, Rogue One was greenlit and marketed as being in direct conversation with the original trilogy from the 1970s and ‘80s, right down to digital cameos made by the deceased Peter Cushing and a young Carrie Fisher (who was alive when Rogue One went into production). It also was all about the Death Star from the ’77 picture.Meanwhile every “Skywalker Saga” film in the mainline Star Wars franchise after The Force Awakens, was forced to react to the choices made by the previous filmmaker. On Star Wars: The Last Jedi, Rian Johnson was handed a movie that needed to continue the story of Ben Solo, Han and Leia’s son who killed his father before Luke Skywalker ever reentered the story, and with Luke cast away to a mysterious and self-imposed exile. Whether you liked Johnson’s choices about why Luke would banish himself from his friends and family, or how Johnson continued other threads dangled by Abrams, at the end of the day he had to work with the limitations that had been immediately placed on him by the previous Star Wars movie(s).Ironically, Abrams would feel this in kind when he returned two years later for the abysmal Rise of Skywalker, a movie which spends an exorbitant amount of time attempting to reverse Johnson’s choices from Last Jedi, turning the whole Sequel Trilogy into a dreary game of telephone between disagreeable directors.Yet therein lies the larger point. After The Force Awakens went all-in on nostalgia, most of the first wave of Disney Star Wars films were forced to live with the fallout of that decision, making each subsequent sequel’s narrative path forward narrower and narrower, until Disney found itself literally just remaking the end of Return of the Jedi, complete with Emperor Palpatine somehow returning. Meanwhile the non-Skywalker Saga films were still either partially or wholly greenlit based on the jangling key sounds created by Death Stars and Millennium Falcon sound effects.No director since 2015 has had an opportunity to tackle a wide-open original Star Wars adventure without excessive concern about homaging the past in one form or another. While the small screen has ironically proven more fertile for exploring different obscure corners of this universe, we’d argue the most creatively successful one—Tony Gilroy’s sublime Andor—was still locked into tying into both Star Wars and Rogue One. And the indisputably most successful commercial series, The Mandalorian, willingly became by choice about deep fake cameos of 40-year-old iterations of other characters. It’s still early, but all we know about Levy’s Starfighter is that it’s set five years after the events of Rise of Skywalker. While this means it exists in the same era as Daisy Ridley’s Rey Skywalker and Oscar Isaac’s Poe Dameron, it doesn’t mean they will (or should) appear in Starfighter. It’s a big galaxy out there! And one of the many problems with Rise of Skywalker is how small it began to feel when you discover everyone of importance is either a Skywalker or a Palpatine.Levy has the opportunity to tell whatever kind of Star Wars story he wants, and one that can be as disparately connected with the previous movies as possible. Take advantage of this fact. Do something wildly original. And if it ends up being another feel-good Levy product, a crowd-pleasing spectacle for 12-year-olds… well, that was always the original intent for Lucas when he made a movie about space wizards flying glorified Spitfires across orbiting battleships. Star Wars can be something grander than just that, but right now it most desperately needs to be something fresh. So with a cast like that, maybe it’s time to let ‘em cook and see what gets served up.The post Star Wars: Starfighter Has the Chance to Do Something Not Seen Since The Force Awakens appeared first on Den of Geek.