Disney has dated the 50th anniversary re-release of Star Wars for April 30, 2027. No other news was made available as to whether they’ll reverse engineer George Lucas’ 1997 edits and additions (the Han Solo vs. Greedo who shoots first blah blah) or keep that 20th anniversary print intact.
Recently, the British Film Institute screened the original 1977 print which they noted on their site that the pic’s color “is gloriously unfaded”. That print was also “one of the precious handful of dye transfer IB Technicolor prints produced uniquely for the first British release”. Star Wars – Episode IV – A New Hope counts a lifetime cume of $461M domestic, $775.3M global. It’s the movie that started it all, a multi-billion grossing space opera franchise spanning films, streaming series and merchandise.
The 1997 re-release was very lucrative, calling then DVD audiences to re-watch the classic for the first time in a long time on the big screen; that edition grossing $138.2M domestic, $160M global alone. The reissue also served as a tee-off for Episodes I-III which Lucas was prepping at the time.
Disney also put an Oct. 16, 2026 release date on Imagine Entertainment’s Whalefall from filmmaker Brian Duffield who is also co-writing. It’s billed as The Martian meets 127 Hours in an adaptation of the Daniel Kraus novel about a scuba diver in search of his deceased father’s remains. The diver gets swallowed by an eighty-foot, sixty-ton sperm whale and has only one hour to escape before his oxygen runs out. After giving up on life, the young man is surprised to find a reason to live in the most dangerous and unlikely of places. Justin Kroll first told you about the project which stars Josh Brolin, Eliabeth Shue, John Ortiz, Jane Levy and Emily Rudd.
Disney also scrubbed a May 7, 2027 untitled release from the schedule.
