Last month, Lucasfilm announced that cameras were rolling on Shawn Levy's Star Wars: Starfighter with a black-and-white behind-the-scenes photo, and the Deadpool and Wolverine director has now shared a first official still from the movie to his Instagram.
Captioned "Somewhere in the Mediterranean Sea," the image features stars Ryan Gosling (Barbie, Drive) and Flynn Gray (Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey 2) in-costume as... well, we still don't actually know anything about their characters.
A recent rumor claimed that Gosling and Gray will play uncle and nephew being pursued across the galaxy by a group of ruthless villains, but this has not been confirmed. We do know that the impressive ensemble will also feature Matt Smith (Morbius), Mia Goth (Frankenstein), Aaron Pierre (Lanterns), Simon Bird (The Inbetweeners), Jamael Westman (Hedda), Daniel Ings (Lovesick), and Amy Adams (Man of Steel).
"I feel a profound sense of excitement and honor as we begin production on Star Wars: Starfighter," Levy said in a press release when production began. "From the day Kathy Kennedy called me up, inviting me to develop an original adventure in this incredible Star Wars galaxy, this experience has been a dream come true, creatively and personally."
He added, "Star Wars shaped my sense of what story can do, how characters and cinematic moments can live with us forever. To join this storytelling galaxy with such brilliant collaborators onscreen and off, is the thrill of a lifetime.
The movie will reportedly "have a significantly smaller budget" than the previous Disney-era films, and is described as "a more contained" story. Levy has been developing the script with Jonathan Tropper (This Is Where I Leave You, The Adam Project) since 2022, and is also set to produce via 21 Laps, along with Lucasfilm president (though for how much longer remains to be seen) Kathleen Kennedy.
Following the massive success of Deadpool and Wolverine, Levy is reportedly viewed by Disney as "a must-have, must-keep" director, so there's a good chance he will have a significant amount of creative control over the movie.
"I'll say that the experience of crafting this story has forced me to think about that question," Levy said last year when asked what he hopes to bring to the table with his trip to the Galaxy Far, Far Away. "Because there's only so many times that Star Wars movies can revisit the same section of the timeline, and so it's really forced me - because I don't want to do a Star Wars movie that is redundant to others, nor am I interested in doing one that has to serve another movie."
"I really wanted to craft something that felt organic to me, both in tone and characters, so I think that there is certainly the Force and a connection to something bigger than our individual selves. And the way that that can make us powerful, those themes, combined with visual delight and wish fulfilment, that's Star Wars to me."