Star Wars’ New Movie Had To Completely Change Its Ending (but It’s Actually a Good Thing)

Star Wars movies are finally headed back to theaters, starting with Star Wars: Starfighter in the summer of 2027. Directed by Shawn Levy (Deadpool & Wolverine) and starring Ryan Gosling alongside young newcomer Flynn Gray, Starfighter will be the first Star Wars movie to be set after the events of The Rise of Skywalker. All we know about the story is that Gosling will be playing a roguish pilot type, who somehow gets mixed up with a young kid. Levy has been conspicuously tight-lipped about any other details… until now.

In a new interview, Shawn Levy discussed his work on Star Wars: Starfighter and made a pretty significant reveal about the production. According to the filmmaker, they’ve had to make some big changes to the ending of Starfighter, but fans will reportedly love the revised climax that they’ve come up with.

“On Starfighter, we had a whole different idea for something in the third act, and then things didn’t align, and I was forced to come up with a new idea,” Levy explained to Kevin McCarthy on his On Film… podcast. “And I’m literally right now shooting that section of the movie, and every day I’m grateful that the way I was supposed to do it didn’t work out. Because the new idea that it forced me to explore is so much better than the original would have been.”

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Blockbuster films having to revise their third acts is nothing new. It’s certainly not a new practice for the Star Wars franchise, which has had to (in)famously reshoot several of its biggest modern films, most notably the prequel film Rogue One. But unlike director Gareth Edwards (who was replaced in post-production by Andor‘s Tony Gilroy), Shawn Levy sounds like he’s taking the creative challenge in stride. At this point, Levy has significant experience working with a big franchise universe, so he knows: it’s a beach of shifting sands on which to build a house. Even if Shawn Levy had a particular vision for how Star Wars: Starfighter should end, it may have run up against budgetary constraints, or some of the narrative turns Levy had in the script (written by his longtime collaborator Jonathan Tropper) might have clashed with other plans Lucasfilm has in motion. Then there’s the audience: Star Wars fandom has never been more fickle or divided. Coming up with a proper finale for the next film is a must.

“It does feel different. It’s harder and a more unique pressure than any other movie you could make,” Levy explained. “Because you go into it understanding how deeply emotional the connection with audiences is. Now, you could argue, ‘That’s true of Marvel. That’s true of other franchises.’ But nothing is as religious an allegiance as Star Wars. And so the need, the pressure (self-inflicted mostly) to get it right, that’s intense.

The director went on to hint that, unlike any of his previous film projects (including Deadpool & Wolverine), Star Wars: Starfighter is putting him through the paces of having ‘too many cooks in the kitchen,’ when it comes to studio and executive input.

“I’ll admit to you: The first few weeks of shooting, it felt like this oppressive cloud over me, because every day they would come to me. It’s a hundred questions a day,” Levy recounted.

It’s not surprising that there’s so much buzz and input on Starfighter. The post-TRoS era of Star Wars also has a film about Rey Skywalker’s (Daisy Ridley) mission to rebuild the Jedi Order in the works; ergo, Starfighter may be low-key responsible for laying the groundwork for the entire next era of Star Wars movies.

“With Starfighter: It’s not a sequel. It’s not a prequel. It is not legacy characters. And it’s not in a period of time in the galaxy that’s ever been explored,” Levy said. “What this means is that we are inventing everything in this movie. And the desire to make design choices, character choices, planet choices, costume choices, droid choices, alien choices – all of it needs to feel Star Warsy, but I’m frickin’ determined to not make any of it feel derivative, or lazily copycat. And I’ll say, so far, the encouragement I’ve gotten from Disney and from Kathy Kennedy and Lucasfilm to forge new ground, it’s been the one constant ever since I gave them an outline.”

Star Wars: Starfighter is currently in production and has a release date of May 28, 2027. The film stars Ryan Gosling, Flynn Gray, Matt Smith, Mia Goth, Aaron Pierre, Simon Bird and Amy Adams, among others. Let us know what you want to see from the movie and the future of the Star Wars franchise on the ComicBook Forum!