Star Wars Is Bringing the Original 1977 Cut Back to Theaters

For close to thirty years, going to see the original Star Wars in a theater has meant seeing the revised one. The 1977 film stayed home while its Special Edition descendants — the 1997 rework, then the later rounds of tinkering — took every big-screen booking the franchise offered. That ends on February 19, 2027.

Disney and Lucasfilm announced the date on Thursday as the centrepiece of the film’s 50th-anniversary year. A restored version of the original Star Wars opens in theaters on thousands of screens globally, in IMAX 70mm, Digital IMAX, Digital Cinema, 70mm, 35mm, 4DX and D-BOX. Screenings open with a celebratory logo backed by a newly orchestrated score from John Williams. Ticket sale information is still to come, the companies said.

What “original” actually means here

It means the film audiences saw in 1977, before the additions and alterations that became the default text. No computer-generated Jabba in the hangar. The cantina confrontation plays the way it was cut in 1977. Even the title steps back: the rerelease is billed simply as Star Wars, the name the film carried before the Episode IV — A New Hope subtitle was attached once the sequels arrived.

Fans have not had an easy legal way to watch this version for a long time. Its last appearance was as a bonus feature on a 2006 DVD release, in standard definition, while the revised editions got the restorations and the theatrical runs. When the British Film Institute screened an original 1977 print from its archive in London in June 2025, the screenings were treated as an event precisely because the version had become so scarce. Next February it stops being scarce all at once.

“It is incredibly special to mark the 50th anniversary by returning the original version of Star Wars to theaters so audiences can experience this part of film history on the big screen,” Lucasfilm Co-President Lynwen Brennan said in the announcement. The new poster, by artist Matt Ferguson, makes the same argument visually — it pays homage to the artwork created for the film in 1977, with Luke Skywalker, Princess Leia, Han Solo and Chewbacca standing over Tatooine under the Death Star.

A documentary built from the days nobody knew

The anniversary’s second archival piece arrives on May the 4th. The Hero Awakens, a new documentary from filmmaker R.J. Cutler, premieres on Disney+ and details the making of Star Wars using archival footage and audio captured during and around the production in 1977 — material recorded before anyone involved knew the film would work, let alone last fifty years. It is produced by Lucasfilm, Cutler and This Machine, and Kennedy/Marshall.

Most Star Wars retrospectives are told by people who already know the ending. A documentary assembled from what was captured at the time is different: the uncertainty is in the record, not reconstructed decades later.

Two versions of the same film, one anniversary

There is a wrinkle worth noticing. In March 2027, the immersive venue company Cosm will debut a Shared Reality version of Star Wars: A New Hope inside its 12K+ LED Domes in Atlanta, Dallas, Detroit and Los Angeles, the first title in a multiyear, multifilm deal between Disney and Cosm. The Cosm presentation surrounds the film with generated environments — Tatooine, the Death Star, the Millennium Falcon at lightspeed — and comes with themed food and drink and an exclusive poster from Shepard Fairey’s Studio Number One.

But the film at the centre of Cosm’s dome is the 2019 version, not the 1977 original. So the anniversary year offers the same movie in two opposite directions at once: in regular theaters, the oldest cut, presented as plainly as modern formats allow; in Cosm’s domes, the newest cut, wrapped in an environment built around it. Which one a fan chooses says something about what they think the film is — a historical object, or a place to step inside.

The rest of the year, briefly

The calendar around those releases is full. Ahsoka returns to Disney+ for a second season on January 20, with Rosario Dawson back in the title role and Grand Admiral Thrawn as the threat. Star Wars: The Experience, a behind-the-scenes exhibition at the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia billed as the largest official exhibition of the anniversary year, opens February 13, with tickets on sale now. Star Wars Celebration runs April 1–4 at the Los Angeles Convention Center — already sold out — and the same weekend, on April 2–3, the Hollywood Bowl hosts Star Wars in Concert: The Skywalker Saga, a live-orchestra journey through all nine films hosted by Anthony Daniels, the actor behind C-3PO.

On May 28, Star Wars: Starfighter, directed by Shawn Levy and starring Ryan Gosling in an all-new era with all-new characters, opens in theaters. Hasbro’s anniversary lines open for preorder on November 13, and a seven-piece LEGO collection follows on January 1.

None of that is the headline, though. Only one item on the calendar gives audiences something they have been denied for decades rather than something new to buy: the film itself, as it was. For a generation raised on the revised editions, February 19 is the first chance to find out what the fuss in 1977 was actually about — unedited, and very loud in IMAX 70mm.