Star Wars Officially Takes Over Super Bowl LXI for 50th Anniversary
Ryan O'Rourke is a Senior News Writer at Collider with a specific interest in all things adult animation, video game adaptations, and the work of Mike Flanagan. He is also an experienced baseball writer with over six years of articles between multiple outlets, most notably FanSided's CubbiesCrib. Whether it's taking in a baseball game, a new season of Futurama or Castlevania: Nocturne, or playing the latest From Software title, he is always finding ways to show his fandom. When it comes to gaming and anything that takes inspiration from it, he is deeply opinionated on what's going on. Outside of entertainment, he's a graduate of Eureka College with a Bachelor's in Communication where he honed his craft as a writer. Between The IV Leader at Illinois Valley Community College and The Pegasus at Eureka, he spent the majority of his college career publishing articles on everything from politics to campus happenings and, of course, entertainment for the student body. Those principles he learned covering the 2020 election, Palestine, and so much more are brought here to Collider, where he has gleefully written on everything from the SAG-AFTRA and WGA strikes to Nathan Lane baby-birding sewer boys.
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Next year will be a colossal milestone for Star Wars. 2027 officially marks 50 years since George Lucas' legendary sci-fi franchise was born with the release of Star Wars: Episode IV — A New Hope on May 25, 1977. Disney has big plans in the works to make the celebration of the landmark series and its iconic characters felt throughout the entire galaxy, from a return of the film that started it all to theaters with a new restoration, to an entirely new adventure in the Ryan Gosling-led Star Wars: Starfighter, the first-ever audiobook release of the original trilogy's novelizations, and even a monumental crossover with Marvel Comics kicking off in January. Speaking of kick-offs, there will also be an unexpected visitor to a galaxy far, far away for the occasion — the National Football League.
Ever since 2023, Disney and ESPN have joined the NFL in producing a Funday Football telecast, a real-time animated alternative to that day's football broadcast featuring characters from an IP of their choosing. The first edition took place in Andy's Bedroom from Toy Story and featured Woody, Buzz, and the gang taking part in the game, followed by The Simpsons in 2024 and Monsters, Inc. While these telecasts have taken place during normal games, Lucasfilm will join the team to help Star Wars take over the big game. On Sunday, February 14, 2027, Disney+, the ESPN app, Disney Channel, and Disney XD will all air the Star Wars Funday Football presentation side-by-side with Super Bowl LXI. The broadcast will be available in over 155 markets worldwide.
Like the previous Funday Football games, the Star Wars edition will recreate every play of the actual game, only with players turned into animated avatars and famous characters subbing in for key moments in the game. Judging from the new key art released alongside the announcement, this Super Bowl may take place under the twin suns of Tatooine, with Stormtroopers and droids alike in attendance for the first NFL game off-planet. Other easter eggs will pop up throughout the game, nodding to the long history of Star Wars. Already, one member of A New Hope's cast will be suiting up to play, as Anthony Daniels will reprise his longtime role as the voice of C-3PO.
Collider Exclusive · 8 Questions · 2 Minutes Which Star Wars Faction Do You Belong To? Rebels · Empire · Mandalorians · Crimson Dawn
Eight honest questions about how you actually are: how you feel about rules, where your loyalty goes first, what you do when somebody criticises you in front of other people. Answer them and we will tell you whose side you would really have ended up on. Four factions are recruiting: the believers, the organisation, the ones with a code, and the ones with a price.
✊Rebel Alliance(Andor)
🛰️The Empire(Original Trilogy)
🪖Mandalorians(The Mandalorian)
🌅Crimson Dawn(Solo)
01
How do you feel about rules at work? This one sorts people faster than anything else.
02
What is your relationship with money? Nobody answers this the way they think they will.
03
What makes you respect somebody? Whatever you pick, you apply it to yourself too.
04
How do you behave under real pressure? Your friends would probably answer this for you.
05
Where does your loyalty go first? Everybody has an order, even if they never say it out loud.
06
Somebody criticises you in front of other people. What happens? Be honest about the first thing you feel.
07
What does a good life look like in ten years? Pick the one you would actually be happy with.
08
What do you want more than anything else? Eight questions in, this is the one that picks your side.
The Transmission Is Decoded Your Faction Is…
Four sides, four completely different answers to the same question about how a galaxy should work. Here is where you would have signed up, what it would ask of you, and what it would give you back.
Rebel Alliance
You belong with the side that has almost nothing and keeps going anyway. The Rebellion is not a glamorous posting, and anybody who tells you otherwise has not seen what it actually costs the people inside it.
- You are wired to notice when something is wrong and to say so, which makes you useful here and awkward almost everywhere else.
- Andor is the best thing Star Wars has made in years precisely because it shows the unglamorous half, which is the meetings, the paperwork and the people who never get a medal.
- Your kind of courage is the ordinary kind, done repeatedly, by somebody who is fully aware of the odds.
- The Alliance wins because enough people decided separately that they were finished being quiet about it.
The Galactic Empire
You belong to the machine, and the uncomfortable truth is that the machine mostly runs on people who are competent, orderly and convinced they are doing their job properly. Very few of them think of themselves as villains.
- You want structure, clear expectations and a way to measure whether you are doing well, none of which the other three factions can offer you.
- The Empire is frightening because of how ordinary it is on the inside, which is the single smartest thing Star Wars has ever done with it.
- Your risk is the quiet one, which is looking at something wrong and deciding it is somebody else's department.
- You would be genuinely good at this, and that is exactly the part worth thinking about.
The Mandalorians
You belong to the people who lost their planet and kept their code anyway. Mandalorian culture is not a nationality so much as a promise, and anybody who makes that promise and keeps it is one of them.
- You are loyal to people rather than to institutions, which is why an organisation chart has never once told you who you actually owe.
- A code only counts when it costs you something, and you are the sort of person who would pay rather than bend it.
- Mandalorians spend the whole saga arguing about what being one even means, and that argument is far more interesting than the armour.
- The Mandalorian and Grogu took the creed to cinemas over Memorial Day 2026, the first Star Wars film in seven years.
Crimson Dawn
You belong to the syndicate, where nobody wastes your time pretending the galaxy runs on ideals. Crimson Dawn deals in leverage, and it is the only faction on this list that would tell you so to your face.
- You read a room for who owes what, and you are usually right, which is a talent that makes people slightly wary of you.
- Qi'ra is the most interesting thing to come out of Solo, because she is the one character who learned the actual lesson about power.
- You would rather be the person setting the terms than the person being told what the terms are.
- The catch is simple enough. In a syndicate, everybody is leverage, including you, and the smart ones never forget that part.
As always, this Super Bowl edition of Funday Football is powered by Sony’s Beyond Sports, utilizing NFL’s Next Gen Stats and Sony’s Hawk-Eye Innovations optical tracking to turn in-game action into animated fun in real time. ESPN will produce with the technology, looking to build on the success the family-friendly alternative has already found. The first telecast earned three Sports Emmy Awards upon its debut. More details about the fourth Funday, including visual settings, commentators, and participating Star Wars characters, will be announced closer to the big game.
A Star Wars animated Super Bowl broadcast isn't all ESPN has planned to celebrate 50 years of the groundbreaking space epic. The festivities start on October 20, when ESPN's daily Disney+ SportsCenter show, SC+, will begin sharing "Hyperspace Highlights" that give the standout plays of the week the Star Wars visual treatment. The very next week, on Monday, October 26, an animated Darth Vader will make his SC+ debut to interview a player involved in that Monday Night Football matchup between the Dallas Cowboys and Philadelphia Eagles, with new interviews featuring the Sith Lord airing each week.
Star Wars Football Funday airs during Super Bowl LXI on February 14 on Disney Channel and Disney XD and streams live on Disney+ and the ESPN app. It'll be just one of several alternate telecasts to that of the main broadcast featuring Joe Buck, Troy Aikman, Lisa Salters, and Laura Rutledge at SoFi Stadium. Latin America, the Caribbean, Australia and New Zealand, Canada (TSN+), the Netherlands, sub-Saharan Africa, Sweden, Singapore, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Japan will be part of the expanded live availability, while the United Kingdom, France, Germany, South Korea, and more will be able to stream the animated broadcast on-demand shortly after the game.
KioskNews shows a cleaned-up reading view extracted from the publisher’s page — the original always lives on their site, not ours.