Star Wars: Starfighter First Look: Ryan Gosling's New Era
Lucasfilm showed the first Star Wars: Starfighter footage at D23 — Ryan Gosling as pilot Kade Auberon, five years after The Rise of Skywalker. May 28, 2027.

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The First Post-Skywalker-Saga Star Wars Film Gets Its First Look
Lucasfilm unveiled the first footage from Star Wars: Starfighter at D23 2026, shown exclusively to the crowd inside Anaheim’s Honda Center — it has not been released publicly online. Ryan Gosling plays pilot Kade Auberon, and director Shawn Levy confirmed the film is set five years after The Rise of Skywalker, making it the first fully standalone Star Wars story built for the post-Skywalker-saga era.
⚔️ This story is part of our Star Wars Live-Action Hub — every live-action series and film, rated and ranked.
Why It Matters for Dads
The reported footage opens in a garage, with Kade warning a boy off touching a decommissioned starfighter that turns out to be the fastest ever built — a scene that plays like a deliberate callback to the franchise’s original “kid finds a ship in the desert” DNA, before the film gets into orbital dogfights and biome chases. That’s a meaningful signal: after nearly a decade of Star Wars films tangled up in sequel-trilogy continuity, this one is explicitly designed to be watchable without three prior movies of homework.
That matters at home in a very practical way. A genuinely standalone entry means you can bring a kid who has never sat through the Skywalker saga straight into this one without a lecture beforehand — a rarer thing in modern Star Wars than it should be. Whether Levy delivers on that promise is the open question for 2027.
What’s Next
No public trailer yet — reporters who saw the in-room footage described it, but Lucasfilm has given no date for an online release. We’ll cover it in full the moment it goes public.
The Dadnology Take
Keeping the first footage in-room only is an unusual marketing choice, but the reported setup — a genuinely standalone story, five years removed from sequel-trilogy baggage, with a supporting cast this stacked (Amy Adams and Matt Smith in a Star Wars movie is not nothing) — is a real reason for cautious optimism. We’ll reserve judgment until we can actually watch something ourselves.
When does Star Wars: Starfighter come out?
Who stars in Star Wars: Starfighter?
Is the Star Wars: Starfighter trailer online?
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