Spaceballs is returning after forty years! Rick Moranis is putting on Dark Helmet again for the sequel to Mel Brooks’ Star Wars parody. But what is there left to laugh at in a galaxy far, far away?
In 1987, Mel Brooks and his team made Spaceballs and immediately turned the possibility of a sequel into a joke. They even gave it a title: Spaceballs 2: The Search for More Money.
Nearly forty years later, Mel Brooks turned one hundred… and actually made the sequel happen. It will have a different title, because in the meantime, he found the money. Apparently, it had been in his basement all along.
The sequel is scheduled to arrive in US cinemas on April 23, 2027, under the title Spaceballs: The New One.
So the forty-year-old joke is finally becoming reality, and only one question remains: is there anything left to make fun of in Star Wars?
May the Force Be with You! And the Money with Us.
Back in 1987, the original Spaceballs had a relatively easy target.
The Star Wars trilogy had already conquered the world, everyone knew its heroes, and the shops were full of action figures, model spaceships, and all sorts of other merchandise.
And there wasn’t nearly as much of it as there is today.
Mel Brooks took the whole galaxy far, far, far, far away, rearranged it a little, turned it upside down, and handed it back to the audience.
Darth Vader became Dark Helmet, whose headgear was so enormous that he occasionally had trouble breathing in it. The Millennium Falcon was replaced by a flying motorhome, and during the legendary lightsaber duel, we discovered that the combatants’ family connections were even more complicated than anything we’d seen in Star Wars.
Brooks also brought the business behind Star Wars into the joke.
Yogurt, the wise master, introduced us to an entire gift shop filled with products from the world of Spaceballs. As he explained, the real money from the movie was made through merchandising.
For example:
Spaceballs: The Flamethrower.
Spaceballs: The Musical.
Spaceballs: The Money.
And so on.
There was also a real agreement behind the scene.
Brooks had consulted George Lucas, who supported the parody but insisted that Spaceballs action figures too closely resembling Star Wars merchandise should not be sold commercially.
Brooks accepted the condition and instead wrote the entire gift-shop scene into the film. So Yogurt ended up advertising products that audiences couldn’t actually buy.
Unfortunately.
Or perhaps fortunately.
Spaceballs: The Rocket Launcher.
We’re at Now Now!
The film contains a surprising number of similarly self-referential scenes. But there’s one in particular we simply have to revisit, because it’s a moment of cinematic history…
Or maybe not. We don’t know. But it’s definitely very funny.
In the scene, Dark Helmet and Colonel Sandurz take out a videotape to locate the heroes who are trying to escape from them.
Except the tape doesn’t contain security-camera footage.
It contains the VHS version of Spaceballs itself.
The very film we’re watching.
Sandurz fast-forwards the tape until they reach the scene in which they are watching the tape.
On the screen, Dark Helmet and Sandurz appear, watching a screen on which Dark Helmet and Sandurz are watching a screen on which…
The scene does more than simply break the fourth wall (the imaginary boundary separating the fictional world of a film from its audience). It allows the film to reflect on itself in the present.
The characters use the film itself, as though it were the most natural thing in the world, to find out what’s happening in it.
We are, as Sandurz explains, looking at now.
We’re at now now!
(There may have been a similar storyline in Northern Exposure, where the characters read the screenplay, but that was a very long time ago, and we can’t remember the details.)
You don’t even need a lightsaber for a joke like this.
Just a VCR, a few well-written lines, and Mel Brooks’ extraordinary playfulness.
Dark Helmet Returns
One of the biggest surprises about the upcoming sequel is that a substantial part of the original cast is returning.
Bill Pullman is back as Lone Starr, Daphne Zuniga as Princess Vespa, and Mel Brooks as both Yogurt and President Skroob.
Brooks is also involved as a producer, although this time he has entrusted the directing to Josh Greenbaum (Strays, Will & Harper), who is at least half a century younger than he is.
Among the new cast members, Lewis Pullman is particularly interesting. He is Bill Pullman’s son in real life, and he will also play the original hero’s son in the film.
But the biggest comeback is undoubtedly Rick Moranis.
One of the most popular comedy actors of the 1980s and 1990s, Moranis gradually stepped away from Hollywood after his wife died in 1991, choosing to focus on raising their two children.
He never gave up acting entirely, but he left feature-film roles behind for a long time.
Now, however, he’s putting on Dark Helmet again.
And at San Diego Comic-Con in 2026, he had already given the audience quite a surprise: he hid among fans dressed in costume, then suddenly appeared on stage alongside the other cast members.
If anyone thought Dark Helmet had disappeared from the galaxy for good, it might be time to reconsider.
A Galaxy Far, Far Away, Forty Years Later
Of course, Star Wars has changed quite a bit since the original Spaceballs was released.
And so has the rest of the world, for that matter.
The original three theatrical films have grown into an entire universe of prequel and sequel trilogies, standalone films, animated series, and live-action television productions.
We’ve also learned that family relationships in the galaxy can be even more complicated than we thought back in 1987.
And death isn’t necessarily a permanent obstacle to returning in the next instalment.
In a world like this, Dark Helmet shouldn’t have too much trouble making a comeback either.
At most, he might have to watch three prequel series on VHS first, just to find out exactly what happened to him over the past forty years.
The official plot synopsis for the new Spaceballs film, meanwhile, opens with the revelation that somehow, Dark Helmet has returned.
In the story, Lone Starr and Vespa’s son, Prince Starburst, must track down the legendary characters from the original film so that they can face another galactic threat.
The premise is familiar enough.
But Star Wars itself has repeatedly returned to its old heroes, passed the torch to new generations, and made its own past part of its stories.
So the new Spaceballs doesn’t just have a much larger galaxy to make fun of.
It also has an entire franchise and the world that has grown around it, where creators and fans alike are already perfectly happy to play with old stories, recurring motifs, and familiar characters.
But perhaps that’s precisely where the opportunity lies.
What happens, for example, if Dark Helmet meets his own son, who also dresses up as Dark Helmet, because his father was already a reimagined version of an earlier villain?
Or what if, before saving the galaxy, the whole gang has to figure out exactly which timeline their new adventure takes place in?
And when are we finally going to discover that Yogurt has a twin brother nobody knew about?
The Money Has Been Found
The Spaceballs sequel already has one joke that didn’t even require a screenplay:
The fact that it actually got made.
The old heroes are returning, a new generation is arriving, and one of the biggest attractions of the whole enterprise is precisely the chance to meet the characters we fell in love with forty years ago.
The only question now is whether the filmmakers can come up with enough new jokes to make us remember this film just as fondly forty years from now.
May the Force (and Dark Helmet) be with them.
The money, it seems, is already taken care of.
