Starfighter’s Ending Is Being Reshot. Is The Disney Star Wars Curse Back?
Shawn Levy revealed he was “forced” to change the ending of Star Wars: Starfighter.
Reshoots are normal. When a movie or TV episode wraps principal photography, there’s always a chance that additional scenes need to be filmed, or even rewritten and entirely recrafted. In the world of film commentary and journalism and geekdom, we tend to all, perhaps, overreact when we hear that some major movie is getting a ton of reshoots. Having said that, the next major Star Wars film is going through what sounds like a fairly drastic reshoot, which will completely change the ending of the film. Cause for panic or business as usual?
Speaking on a November episode of the On Film...With Kevin McCarthy Podcast, director Shawn Levy was candid about the current state of the new standalone Star Wars film, Star Wars: Starfighter. And he confirmed that he was specifically “forced” to create an entirely new ending:
“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 said. “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 idea would have been.”
Right now, we have no context for this, and Levy seems very, very enthusiastic and happy about the film’s pivot. So, relative to other reshoots in the Disney era of Star Wars movies, this might be tame. 2016’s Rogue One underwent a huge number of reshoots, so many that many scenes from the trailers don’t exist in the final film at all. (Plus that famous Darth Vader ending comes from reshoots, which is either a great or terrible thing, depending on who you ask.) Meanwhile, 2018’s Solo: A Star Wars Story was the most infamous Star Wars reshoot kerfuffle, with essentially the entire first take on the movie, from directors Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, totally thrown out and redone by Ron Howard. And though 2019’s The Rise of Skywalker didn’t have huge reshoots, it did begin its life as an entirely different film called Duel of the Fates, from writer-director Colin Trevorrow, who was later replaced by J.J. Abrams.
So, one could argue — and many have — that massive pivots in new Star Wars movies during the Disney era have led to a few disappointing results. That said, it’s too early to say whether or not that’s the case with Starfighter, since, at this point, we know so little about the actual story of the movie, other than Ryan Gosling’s character is protecting a young person played by Flynn Gray. We also know that this movie is set after The Rise of Skywalker, but is not “Episode X” or anything like that.
On another positive and optimistic note, it seems that Levy feels that Disney and Lucasfilm have been pretty easy to work with and haven’t been bullying him into doing anything. His proof? Both the promotional photos for Starfighter that we’ve seen so far were utterly unplanned. “It was just two spontaneous moments, where I looked up and was like ‘that is an awesome image.’”
Levy points out that some have asked him if it’s “all very calculated” in terms of releasing these images, and he says that the opposite is true, saying in the same interview that his motivations for sharing these images were about “seeing something that felt magic to me.”
Will that feeling of magic survive the reshoots? For now, it seems the Force is still strong with Starfighter, even if its original ending may never be fully understood.
