By Emmanuel King
Disney’s next trip to a galaxy far, far away is not coming cheap. According to a new Forbes report drawn from UK production filings, Star Wars: Starfighter had already cost $226.5 million by the time principal photography wrapped, and that figure is only the beginning of the bill.
The numbers come from financial statements filed by Blue Mist Productions, the company Disney set up in Britain for the film. Because productions that shoot in the UK must file public accounts to claim tax relief, the filings offer a rare, detailed look at what a modern Star Wars movie actually costs. They cover spending through January 31, 2026, about a month after cameras stopped rolling at Pinewood Studios outside London. The production also shot on location in Sardinia, Italy, after beginning filming in August 2025.
The British government has already refunded $51.5 million of the spend through its Audio-Visual Expenditure Credit, bringing the net cost so far down to roughly $175 million. The filings list staff costs of $17.6 million as the single biggest expense, spread across a crew that averaged 239 people a month.
What the figure does not yet include matters just as much. Months of visual effects work, finishing post-production and a global marketing campaign all remain to be paid for before the film opens on May 28, 2027, so the final budget will climb well beyond $226.5 million.
The comparisons are revealing. At the same stage of production, Starfighter has outspent The Force Awakens and sits roughly on par with The Last Jedi, though it trails The Rise of Skywalker, whose final cost in the same UK filings eventually reached about $593 million. At the same time, thanks to the tax refunds already banked, Starfighter’s net spend currently ranks second lowest among Disney’s Star Wars films, above only The Mandalorian and Grogu, which was shot in Los Angeles specifically to keep costs contained.
The context makes the spend a statement. The Mandalorian and Grogu underperformed earlier this year, and Starfighter is positioned as the franchise’s big-screen reset: a standalone story set five years after The Rise of Skywalker, in a stretch of the timeline the films have never explored, built entirely around new characters. Lucasfilm unveiled it at Star Wars Celebration in Japan and has kept an unusually tight lid on the production since, releasing a single on-set photograph.
It is also, unmistakably, a bet on a movie star. Ryan Gosling leads the film as Kade Auberon, a pilot with a mysterious past, and he is being handed something no actor of his generation has carried before: a Star Wars event film resting almost entirely on his shoulders, with no legacy character to hide behind. The cast around him underlines the ambition, with Amy Adams, Matt Smith, Mia Goth, Aaron Pierre, Eva Mendes, Daniel Ings, Simon Bird, Jamael Westman and newcomer Flynn Gray all aboard.
Behind the camera, director Shawn Levy arrives fresh from Deadpool & Wolverine, one of the biggest hits of the decade, working from a script by Jonathan Tropper, his collaborator on The Adam Project. Oscar-winning cinematographer Claudio Miranda, who shot Top Gun: Maverick, is behind the lens. A production that passes $226.5 million before a single effects shot is finished is Lucasfilm announcing that this is not streaming content scaled up. It is an event film, built around a star performance, and Gosling will be expected to carry every dollar of it.
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