Sure, there’s a Star Wars movie coming out in five months’ time that we barely know anything about, but next year, there is another Star Wars movie coming out that we barely know anything about, too: Shawn Levy’s Star Wars: Starfighter. We know the cast, including Ryan Gosling’s lead hero. We know there’s speeders. We know there’s a big water sequence, and some classically Star Wars-ian tight pants. We presume to know that there’s going to be spaceships in it (shocker). But now we know one extra detail that makes Starfighter suddenly more interesting.
As part of a brief profile of Levy published by the New York Times today, the paper revealed a delightfully odd fact from the set of the new film: Tom Cruise paid a visit and helped shoot a scene.
“Last week Steven Spielberg was here. And now Tom Cruise is wielding a camera, ruining his very nice shoes,” Levy reflected (the interview took place in November last year, before Starfighter had wrapped), saying that Cruise was initially there just to watch, but after Levy jokingly offered the chance for Cruise to get stuck in, he did. “Now when you see the movie, you’ll know that part of it was shot by Tom. I mean, how cool is that?”
That’s a fun factoid as-is, letting Tom Cruise join an elite tier of people who’ve actually managed to help shoot a Star Wars movie since The Rise of Skywalker was released in 2019—more than some of the directors Lucasfilm has publicly hired to actually direct Star Wars movies in the last 7 years, even. But what is interesting is the scene the Times says Cruise helped shoot. The paper describes what Levy and Crusie were filming as “a lightsaber duel in the water.”
On the one hand, a lightsaber in a Star Wars movie—a likely place for it to be, and some may groan that a film that seemed like it might be removed from Star Wars‘ typical focuses now might not be so removed. But on the other, given that one of the few things we do know about the film is that Starfighter is set five years after the events of Rise, the existence of a lightsaber duel (and more specifically, enough people with them to have such a duel in the film) raises some very interesting questions about the movie and its focus.
Of course, one of those questions is who the hell is fighting in the duel. Could it be Gosling’s character? Perhaps Flynn Gray’s mysterious young child? Someone else? Could it be a flashback to the past, rather than something in the present? And who are they up against—Mia Goth or Matt Smith’s mysterious villains?
Tom Cruise knows, presumably, but the rest of us mortals will have to wait until closer to Starfighter‘s May 28, 2027 release date to learn more.
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