Star Wars turns 50 in 2027, and Lucasfilm already found the right gift.
Cosm found a different one, and it is the wrong idea for this particular movie.
On Feb. 19, 2027, Lucasfilm and Disney will put a restored version of the original 1977 film back in theaters on thousands of screens, in IMAX 70mm, 70mm and 35mm. “It is incredibly special to mark the 50th anniversary by returning the original version of Star Wars to theaters,” Lucasfilm co-president Lynwen Brennan said in the studio’s announcement.
Weeks later, Cosm screens the same title differently. Starting in March 2027, Cosm will run the 2019 Disney+ remaster of A New Hope on its 87-foot wraparound LED dome at venues in Inglewood, Atlanta, Dallas and Detroit. The film plays as a 16:9 image at the center of the dome, with supplemental CGI content built around it by Lucasfilm, ILM and the effects house MakeMake. It opens a multiyear, multifilm deal between Disney and Cosm. Shepard Fairey’s Studio Number One made the poster for the run, a nice detail and nothing more.
The dome can keep doing Harry Potter and The Matrix. Star Wars is the one title where adding more is the least interesting option available.
A film that has never been allowed to finish
Han shot first, then Greedo did, in the 1997 Special Edition that also added a Jabba the Hutt scene. The 2004 DVD and 2011 Blu-ray reworked the cantina again, and the 2019 Disney+ launch gave Greedo a fresh line fans transcribed as “Maclunkey,” a change Disney told The Hollywood Reporter George Lucas made before the studio bought Lucasfilm. Collider counted four versions of one scene reaching a screen.
Lucas told the AP in 2004 exactly where he stood. “The special edition, that’s the one I wanted out there,” he said. “The other movie, it’s on VHS, if anybody wants it.” Refurbishing the 1977 cut would cost “millions,” and “to me, it doesn’t really exist anymore.”
It exists now, finally, at the scale he once declined to pay for: a theatrical restoration in IMAX and 70mm. That’s the correct instinct for a 50th birthday. It raises the obvious question of why the same anniversary needs a second version with more layered on top.
Scalice’s own words make the case against the dome
“I always say it’s like a best-hits album, where you have got to deliver,” Cosm Studios VP Alexis Scalice told the LA Times. “You’ve got to deliver on light speed. You’ve got to deliver on moments.” To Variety she named the targets directly: “the trash compactor scene and the lightspeed.”
A best-hits album is a compilation of songs that already worked.
The trash compactor and the jump to lightspeed are set pieces built to land inside an ordinary rectangle, and for 49 years they have. The only thing new on that dome wall is the CGI filling the space around them, which means the newest pixels in the room are sitting next to the 1977 work that won the film one of its seven Academy Awards, from an effects house Lucas founded in 1975 specifically to build them. Scalice promised “moments and effects that you haven’t ever seen before at Cosm.” That’s a pitch for what’s new in the room. The 50-year-old film becomes the thing holding down the middle of the frame while the show happens around it, which is the same question Movie Opinions asked about whether a third take on a classic earns its place rather than just restating that the original worked.
The dome is genuinely good at places that need building out. The LA Times reported cheers when Hogwarts first appeared at the Harry Potter run, with the film itself left untouched. The Matrix booking turned the red pill scene into a room of glowing capsules. Those films hand an audience a world to step into. The 1977 Star Wars handed an audience a frame, and the frame itself was the most advanced thing in any theater that showed it.
The business case for Cosm is real and worth saying plainly. Sony put $100 million into the company in June, Disney is the third major studio to sign on after Warner Bros. and Universal, and the 1997 Special Edition pulled in $138.3 million domestically. More has sold tickets before. Scalice also insists the feature itself stays whole. “The film remains the hero, and how can we expand?” she told Variety. The first half is the right instinct.
It just doesn’t need an answer this year.
The 1977 cut spent decades as an afterthought, dropped onto a second DVD disc in 2006 in a non-anamorphic 4:3 letterbox nobody had bothered to upgrade since 1994. February 19 is the night it finally gets the marquee on its own terms. One film, one screen, nothing new crowding the air around it: that’s the only version of this anniversary worth standing in line for.
