NY Times: Can Shawn Levy Resuscitate 'Star Wars'

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Tom Cruise was up to his ankles in mud and pond water. He wore a look of great concentration as he stooped over a digital camera, trying to frame the perfect shot.

Shawn Levy glanced around in slight disbelief. Partly it was that he was on the set of his very own “Star Wars” movie, “Star Wars: Starfighter,” with Ryan Gosling. And partly it was the steady stream of A-list visitors. “Last week Steven Spielberg was here. And now Tom Cruise is wielding a camera, ruining his very nice shoes.”

It was a brisk morning in November and Cruise had dropped by from nearby London, landing his helicopter on set as the crew piped in the “Mission: Impossible” theme over the loudspeakers. Cruise just wanted to watch, he told them, but Levy, setting up a scene involving a lightsaber duel in the water, suggested the star jump on one of the cameras. He’d meant it as a joke. But there was Cruise, wading into the muddy pond, holding the camera like a pro.

“Now when you see the movie,” Levy said — it’s scheduled for 2027 — “you’ll know that part of it was shot by Tom. I mean, how cool is that?”

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In an industry where nothing is certain, the studios have come to see Levy as among the most reliable names in the business: not difficult, not temperamental and, most important, almost supernaturally attuned to audience tastes. Going by boxofficemojo.com, of the 15 studio features he has directed since 2002, all have at least broken even and most have been profitable. Even the few films that Levy himself describes as disappointments — “The Internship,” an inoffensive workplace comedy from 2013 starring Owen Wilson and Vince Vaughn, “definitely underperformed,” he said ruefully — still recouped their production budgets, while the most successful, like “Night at the Museum” and “Deadpool & Wolverine,” are among the highest-grossing movies of all time.

It’s perhaps this record that appealed to Lucasfilm and Disney executives, who are eager to win back some good will for “Star Wars” after the widely perceived failure of the franchise’s recent installments, including “The Rise of Skywalker” and the spinoff “Solo: A Star Wars Story.” As much as “Deadpool & Wolverine” was felt to have righted Marvel’s ship amid a phase of superhero fatigue, there’s hope that the Levy touch can make “Star Wars” relevant again.

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