Star Wars Is Finally Coming to IMAX 70mm — 50 Years Late
Star Wars is heading to IMAX 70mm film for the first time in its history — twice, in the same window. A restored A New Hope returns to theaters February 19, 2027 for its 50th anniversary, and Star Wars: Starfighter debuts in the format three months later, shot on IMAX-certified cameras from the ground up.
Fifty years is a long time to wait for a format. A New Hope has played on 35mm, been remastered for DVD, gotten the Special Edition treatment three separate times, streamed in 4K on Disney+, and never once, in any of those releases, played on an actual IMAX screen. That changes February 19, 2027, when a newly restored version of George Lucas's original film returns to theaters — including a select number of true IMAX 70mm film locations — as the centerpiece of the fiftieth anniversary celebration.
Three months later, Star Wars: Starfighter opens on May 28, 2027, and it's arriving in the format too, but for a completely different reason: Shawn Levy's film was actually shot with IMAX-certified cameras from the start and finished as IMAX 70mm film prints, making it the first Star Wars production built for the format rather than converted into it after the fact.
Why This Actually Matters, Not Just as a Format Flex
IMAX 70mm isn't a marketing sticker — it's a genuinely different way of watching a movie. The 70mm film frame captures roughly four to ten times the resolution of standard 35mm, projected on screens that can run seven stories tall, with a sound system built around the image rather than bolted onto it afterward. Christopher Nolan has spent the last decade turning "shot on IMAX film" into a selling point audiences actively seek out. Denis Villeneuve did the same with Dune. Star Wars, a franchise literally built on scale — Star Destroyers, Death Stars, the sheer size of the Millennium Falcon's hyperspace jump — has somehow never had a single frame of its theatrical run projected in the format that exists specifically to make scale hit harder.
That's what makes Starfighter the more forward-looking half of this announcement. Retrofitting a restoration into IMAX is a nice birthday gift. Building a film around the format from pre-production onward is Lucasfilm finally treating a Star Wars movie the way Nolan treats his own — as something designed to be enormous on purpose, not upscaled into enormity after the fact.
The Question Nobody's Answered Yet
Here's the part every long-time fan is going to be watching closely, and the reporting so far is deliberately vague on it: which cut of A New Hope is actually getting restored. This is the film that's been re-edited more times than any other major blockbuster in history — the 1977 theatrical cut, the 1997 Special Edition (hello, Jabba scene), the 2004 DVD tweaks, the 2011 Blu-ray pass, all with the "Han shot first" fight following it every step of the way. Lucasfilm hasn't confirmed whether this restoration leans on the original theatrical elements or the more heavily revised Special Edition lineage, and that ambiguity is going to generate its own news cycle between now and February.
I'll say this diplomatically, because there's no need to relitigate a forty-year argument in a news piece: whichever cut gets the restoration, the fact that this is A New Hope's first-ever IMAX presentation in any form is the story that matters more than which greebles are in the Mos Eisley cantina. A generation of fans who've only ever seen this film on a television screen or a standard cinema projection are about to get their first shot at the version of scale Lucas was actually reaching for with a Panavision camera and a very small budget in 1976.
A Franchise Finally Catching Up to Its Own Ambition
There's something a little poetic about A New Hope getting this treatment the same year Starfighter debuts in the same format. One film is a fifty-year-old artifact getting the technical upgrade it always deserved. The other is a brand-new story, led by Ryan Gosling's Kade Auberon, built from frame one with exactly this kind of screen in mind. Together they bracket the entire history of this franchise's relationship with scale — where it started, technically constrained by 1970s filmmaking, and where it's ending up, with directors like Levy treating IMAX cameras as a baseline requirement rather than a luxury upgrade.
Fifty years from a scrappy independent space opera to a franchise finally getting the format its own mythology always demanded. That's worth celebrating on its own terms, cut controversies and all. May the Force be with whoever's running the projector on February 19, 2027 — that's a big screen with a lot to live up to.
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