Star Wars: Starfighter

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Disney have announced a new Star Wars movie about Starfighters

Disney have announced a new, stand-alone movie called Starfighter for release May 28th, 2027. This is good news for so many reasons.

First off, it’s a Star Wars movie. Say what you will about the mishandled (in my opinion) production of Episodes VII-IX, but the series has far more hits than misses. 

Secondly, May 2027 is the 50th anniversary of the release of the original movie. Star Wars was originally released on Wednesday 25th May 1977. Star Wars: Starfighter will be released on 28th May 2027. That’s not exactly 50 years, but close enough. Paramount dropped the ball on the 50th anniversary of STar Trek, so it’s good to see Disney have finally announced something here. I was beginning to worry this would be another mishandling of the series’ production.

Thirdly, we are getting our first Star Wars movie dedicated to the starfighter, and it’s about time. The fabric of what makes Star Wars what it is has many threads to pull on, and we have seen plenty of galactic empires, Jedi battles, crime stories, outlaws and scoundrels.

(And if it’s important to you, the movie will star Ryan Gosling. I think star power can sometimes overwhelm some genre movies, personally, but if you are going to get a big name to play your lead, Ryan Gosling is a solid choice.)

Why we need a Starfighter movie

Short answer: Because starfighters are cool. Space dogfights and starfighter combat one of the best things about Star Wars. Think how many iconic scenes we have from the movies just from seeing fighters in space. In the original movie our first fighter-scale combat is the Millenium Falcon vs  four TIE fighters. Later we have the Battle of Yavin, where the Rebels have to attack the first Death Star. 

In The Empire Strikes Back we have the Falcon again evading TIE fighters through the asteroid field, and in Return of the Jedi we have what might still be the best space battle ever committed to screen in the Battle of Endor. We have fighters vs fighters, fighters vs capital ships, and fighters flying inside the second Death Star. (Obviously no lessons were learned from the first Death Star – they went and made the holes bigger.)

That doesn’t include any scenes which take place on planets, and that’s just the first three movies. Episodes I-III, and VII-IX had some good battles too, and the TV shows have had their moments too. Luthen Rael’s escape from TIE Fighters and a Cantwell-class Imperial cruiser in the Andor season 1 episode Daughter of Ferrix is one of my favourite battles of recent times. It might even deserve its own breakdown one day.

The best Star Wars dogfights all include great action, visual effects, explosions, sound effects, music, and of course they all involve iconic starfighter designs. The X-Wing is simply one of the coolest spaceship designs ever made, and the TIE Fighter is somehow goofy and intimidating, with a totally different design language to anything the rebel alliance fields. A new Star Wars movie about starfighters is a chance for us to see new designs, and bring starfighter combat up to date with the best of modern VFX. No doubt Industrial Light & Magic will be the lead house on this movie, but I bet there are VFX artists working around the world that would love to work on this movie.

What makes starfighter combat good?

All space combat is good space combat as far as I am concerned, but starfighter combat is different to say, capital ship combat, so the story and visuals should handle them differently.

Starfigher combat is inherently more intimate. We are typically following individual pilots in single-crewed ships, like the X-Wing and the A-Wing. If we have come to know these characters, we will be following their individual reactions and feelings. The stakes of the battle are more personal.

The speed and scale of fighter combat is different to capital ships. Capital ship combat (E.g. Star Destroyers) is typically portrayed like naval combat (or as The Wrath of Khan portrayed it, submarine combat). Ships are slow and ponderous while fighters zip around them vying for space superiority.

When they are displayed together, it allows the story to be told at different speeds. Capital ships plan ahead, with slower reaction times, while fighters can be reactive, switching targets and destroying them as quickly as they can lock-on to them.

What I hope to see in Star Wars: Starfighter

There’s a lot to look forward to in a Star Wars movie centered on starfighters, but here is what I would love to see on the big screen in terms of space combat.

  • Squadrons: individual fighters are great, but seeing squadron combat, with massed wings of ships going at it, would be an amazing spectacle. However, for that to work we need…
  • Tactical combat: which means not just throwing turbo-lasers at each other, but actual tactics. How can one side defeat the other without just bringing more guns to bear?
  • Formations: Let’s see a mass of fighters operate in formations, with each one fulfilling a unique role. However for that we need…
  • Defined ship roles: Which are the fighters? Do we have fast interceptors? Slower missile boats? Ships dedicated to ECM, or surveillance? How do they fit in the battlefield? What does combined-arms starfighter combat look like?
  • New ship designs: The existing ship designs are already amazing, and from the Rebel Alliance’s alphabet-themed forces to the Empire’s TIE varients, there is plenty to choose from. We are not lacking anything here, but it would be good to see what a new generation of concept artists and designers can come up with, and see how the writers and director can use those concepts to bring us something new.
  • Cool manoeuvres: 
  • Multi-crew ships: Not every ship has to be a one-person fighter. Bigger ships can pack more power and more versatility, and with a variety of crew on board, we can introduce intra-ship tension between competing crew-members and systems.

What will make Starfighter action work?

What will be the impact of a dedicated Starfighter movie?

I hope this movie does really well, both for its own sake, because we need a starfighter Star Wars movie, and because I love space combat and space dogfights. It might also have some wider repercussions.

The X-Wing tabletop game from Atomic Mass might benefit from a third edition released with a new starter box set around the time that Star Wars Starfighter is released. Personally I already have way too many first edition ships to be spending money on another version, but it’s a fun game that needs more love.

Likewise, Star Wars Armada is a space combat game, but played at capital ship scale. In X-Wing, a model represents a single fighter. In Armada, a stand of fighters represents a whole squadron. With enough fighter squadrons you can play with dedicated roles though, e.g. interceptors vs bombers.

Will we get any new computer games based around this movie? Personally, I think fighter combat gaming peaked with X-Wing Alliance, but that came out in the 90s, so I am hardly up to date here. Obviously, we need something with VR and HOTAS support, so we can pretend we are really in the cockpit.