Ryan Gosling led the Ryan Gosling Star Wars starfighter reveal at D23, where the first trailer for Star Wars: Starfighter introduced Kade Auberon and the G17 Imperial Reaper as the fastest starfighter ever built. The film arrives in theaters on May 28, 2027, and the trailer’s speed claim immediately pushes the new project into franchise-record territory.
D23 and the first trailer
At D23 in August, Gosling described Kade as “a guy from the wrong side of the galaxy whose fate is intertwined with the fastest starfighter ever built.” That line gave the trailer its frame: this is not just a new lead for Lucasfilm and Disney, but a ship-driven story built around a speed claim that the franchise has never put on screen in this form.
Inside the trailer, Kade calls his ship a decommissioned G17 Imperial Reaper, and the young boy played by Flynn Gray asks what kind of starfighter it is before Kade answers, “There's a reason for that.” The workshop scene does the practical work here. It turns the ship from background hardware into the story’s selling point, and it gives the reveal a character-level hook instead of a technical dump.
MGLT and the old benchmark
Star Wars tracks sublight speed in megalight per hour, or MGLT, a unit that dates back to an Industrial Light & Magic reference chart built for Return of the Jedi. Before Star Wars: Starfighter, the top number on that chart belonged to the TIE/vn space superiority fighter, also known as the TIE silencer, at 155 MGLT. The TIE dagger from The Rise of Skywalker sits at 150 MGLT, while Major Vonreg’s TIE Baron from Resistance clocks in at 145 MGLT.
That puts the new trailer in a sharp comparison frame: the G17 Imperial Reaper is being introduced as faster than a ship that had held the franchise lead at 155 MGLT, with other familiar high-end fighters trailing behind it. For viewers who follow the vehicle canon as closely as the characters, the number is the point. It is a direct statement that Star Wars: Starfighter is setting a new ceiling, not just adding another design to the hangar.
Fan footage and release date
The trailer was shown behind closed doors at the D23 Expo and was not officially released online afterward, even though fan-filmed recordings briefly circulated before Lucasfilm pulled them down. That limited circulation kept the reveal contained to attendees, but it also turned the speed claim into a piece of controlled scarcity: the public has the headline, not the full footage.
For now, the cleanest way to read the rollout is that Lucasfilm is selling Star Wars: Starfighter on a simple proposition — Ryan Gosling, a new lead in Kade Auberon, and a ship built to outrun everything that came before it. The claim is easy to understand, hard to verify from the available footage online, and built to carry the film until May 28, 2027.
