'Star Wars Funday Football' key art. Image courtesy of Disney.
ESPN, Lucasfilm, Disney and the NFL have announced Star Wars Funday Football, an alternate telecast of Super Bowl LXI animated in real time and set in the Star Wars galaxy, with Anthony Daniels back as the voice of C-3PO. The animated gridiron-fest goes live February 14, 2027 on Disney+, the ESPN App, Disney Channel and Disney XD, beside the main broadcast of ESPN's first Super Bowl, played at SoFi Stadium in Inglewood, California.
A series of animated NFL altcasts on ESPN, Disney and the NFL, Funday Football has run beside regular-season games since October 2023, when the Falcons-Jaguars game played out in Andy's room with Toy Story characters and went on to win three Sports Emmys. The Simpsons took the Bengals-Cowboys game in December 2024, and Monsters Funday Football followed with Eagles-Chargers in December 2025. This is the fourth animated alternate NFL telecast from the partners and the first for a Super Bowl; it joins ESPN's other Super Bowl LXI alternates, with Peyton and Eli on ESPN2, The Pat McAfee Show on ESPNU and Super Bowl LXI Playbook with Next Gen Stats on NFL Network. ESPN's Spanish-language telecast will be on Disney+ and ESPN Deportes, with a separate Spanish-language presentation on Univision.
Every play of the game will be recreated in real time, with the players on the field turned into animated avatars, Star Wars characters subbing in during key moments, and Easter eggs scattered through the broadcast. ESPN produces the telecast with data visualization technology from Sony's Beyond Sports, which has animated every Funday Football since the first, feeding NFL Next Gen Stats player tracking and Sony's Hawk-Eye Innovations optical tracking into animation as the plays happen; the same system powered ESPN's Disney-themed NBA altcast last Christmas.
In the new teaser, C-3PO and R2-D2 crash-land on a desert planet bound for a stadium far, far away, with Daniels recording new lines for the droid. Enjoy:
Outside the U.S., the animated game will stream live across Latin America and the Caribbean, in Australia, New Zealand, Canada (via TSN+), the Netherlands, Japan, Sweden, Singapore, Malaysia and the Philippines, and across sub-Saharan Africa. It then goes on demand on Disney+, shortly after the game, in those territories and others, the U.K., France, Germany and South Korea among them, more than 155 markets in all.
Star Wars also joins the regular season; starting today, SC+, ESPN's daily SportsCenter show on Disney+, runs "Hyperspace Highlights," Monday Night Football plays presented with a Star Wars look, and from October 26 an animated Darth Vader interviews a player from that night's game each Monday.
The altcast lands as Lucasfilm marks 50 years of Star Wars. A newly restored version of the 1977 original is back in theaters February 19, five days after the game, in its first-ever IMAX presentation, in IMAX 70mm at select locations; Star Wars Celebration follows April 1-4 in Los Angeles; and Star Wars: Starfighter, starring Ryan Gosling, hits theaters May 28, the weekend the original turns 50. Details of the animated presentation's settings, commentators and characters are still to come.
Source:ESPN,Lucasfilm