Mel Brooks couldn’t make it to CinemaCon on Wednesday night. He sent a pre-taped video instead, in which he announced the official title of the Spaceballs sequel and explained that he couldn’t be there in person because he was seeing Phish at the Sphere.
Whether this excuse was genuine, a bit, or some combination of both is exactly the kind of question the man who made Spaceballs would appreciate you asking.
The title, in any case, is Spaceballs: The New One, and it arrives in theaters on April 23, 2027, from Amazon MGM Studios, approximately 40 years after the original.
The CinemaCon presentation was, by all accounts, exactly what it needed to be.
What Happened At CinemaCon?
CinemaCon is the annual convention of Cinema United, the exhibitor trade organization, four days at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas where Hollywood studios present upcoming films to the theater owners who will be showing them.
It is less a fan event than a sales event, but the Spaceballs: The New One presentation during Amazon MGM’s Wednesday night showcase was the kind of thing that works on both levels.
Director Josh Greenbaum brought the cast to the stage: Bill Pullman, Daphne Zuniga, Josh Gad, Lewis Pullman, and Rick Moranis, who is returning to a major film role for the first time in roughly 30 years.
The presentation began with Dark Helmet appearing on screen in a pre-taped segment, announcing that he had always dreamed of two things, “to steal the air from Druidia and to open wide domestically on 4800 screens.”
Then the evening’s running joke took over. Every time Moranis attempted to speak, in what would have been his first substantial public comments about returning to film, someone cut him off.
Josh Gad answered for him when a question was directed at him. When Moranis was asked a second question, Keke Palmer appeared via pre-tape and interrupted before he could start.
When he finally produced a prepared speech, Mel Brooks’s pre-taped video interrupted him. Moranis never got a full sentence out.
This was obviously deliberate. It was also, as a piece of meta-comedy at the expense of the most anticipated thing about the whole presentation, completely in the spirit of the franchise it was promoting.
The other quotes from the stage were similarly calibrated. Greenbaum called directing the sequel “the honor of a lifetime” and described the original as “a comedic masterpiece.”
Bill Pullman, asked about the joy of working with a co-star he has a close personal relationship with, deadpanned that he was thrilled to collaborate with “someone I’ve seen blossom into a very special young man, of course, I’m talking about Josh Gad, his actual son Lewis Pullman standing right beside him.
Lewis, when asked how he landed the role, said, “It was a pretty rigorous process, took years. First, I was born.”
Daphne Zuniga said she was delighted to return, provided Amazon arranged a “giant trailer, massive per diem, personal driver, Michelin-star chef, walk-in closet for her luggage” and more.
The Footage Shown
The sizzle reel that Amazon MGM showed to theater owners, and which will presumably be released publicly before long, did not present anything like a conventional trailer.
The narrator acknowledged this up front, “While they can’t show you much, they can show you a series of clips that make little sense out of context.”
The presentation reportedly opened with a voiceover, “Nearly 40 years ago, a promise was made. Some people thought it was just a joke.”
The content of what followed leaned into exactly the targets you would expect from a Mel Brooks property operating in 2026. There are Star Wars lightsaber parodies.
There is a joke about the Paramount/Warner Bros. merger, the voiceover describing Hollywood studios “merging willy nilly like middle-aged couples at a swingers party,” with Amazon MGM the only studio at CinemaCon to publicly reference the pending acquisition.
There are jokes about studios writing off films for tax purposes, riffing on a practice that has generated genuine industry controversy over the past few years.
Brooks appears in the footage in Yoda makeup, reprising, essentially, a version of Yogurt, the Yoda-analog he played in the original.
The standout visual involves a Na’vi, the blue, ten-foot aliens from the Avatar franchise, appearing at a urinal alongside Moranis’s Dark Helmet.
Helmet turns to his enormous new companion and says, in the Na’vi language, “I see you,” the phrase that functions as a deep greeting of recognition in Avatar.
Dark Helmet saying “I see you” in Na’vi to an Avatar character at a urinal is, in miniature, the whole philosophy of the franchise.
The joke is dumb in the best possible way. Brooks has been making jokes like this for seven decades.
Dark Helmet also made clear in the sizzle his ambitions for theatrical domination. He doesn’t just want some screens, “all of them.” “I want VistaVision, even though I don’t know what it is.” He’s reportedly considering a bid on Warner Bros. Discovery.
What Is Spaceballs 2 Going To Look Like?
Spaceballs: The New One is directed by Josh Greenbaum, whose previous films include Barb and Star Go to Vista Del Mar, Strays, and the documentary Too Funny to Fail about the short-lived Dana Carvey Show.
The screenplay is by Josh Gad, Benji Samit, and Dan Hernandez. Producers include Brooks, Gad, Greenbaum, Kevin Salter, Jeb Brody, and Imagine Entertainment’s Brian Grazer and Ron Howard.
The returning cast alongside Brooks and Moranis includes Bill Pullman as Lone Starr, Daphne Zuniga as Princess Vespa, and George Wyner as Colonel Sandurz.
New cast members are Josh Gad (role undisclosed), Keke Palmer (role undisclosed), Lewis Pullman as Starburst, the son of Lone Starr and Princess Vespa, and Anthony Carrigan, best known as NoHo Hank from Barry.
Plot details are being kept under wraps. The film’s official studio description, “A Non-Prequel Non-Reboot Sequel Part Two but with Reboot Elements Franchise Expansion Film.”
The release date of April 23, 2027 puts it about a month before the 40th anniversary of the original. The original Spaceballs opened June 24, 1987.
What Made The Original A Classic?
The original Spaceballs was not a box office triumph. It made just over $38 million worldwide in the summer of 1987, which was a modest result for a major studio comedy of that era.
What it became on home video was something else entirely, one of the most quoted, most rewatched, most beloved comedies of its generation, a film that has existed in the cultural vocabulary of multiple generations of viewers who did not see it in theaters but could recite it back to you on demand.
Brooks directed and co-wrote it, and starred in dual roles as Yogurt (the Yoda-like sage whose power is the Schwartz, not the Force) and President Skroob, the evil ruler of the planet Spaceball.
Rick Moranis played Lord Dark Helmet, a Darth Vader parody who is approximately five feet tall, wears an enormous black helmet that dwarfs him entirely, and gets into conversations about the stupidity of his own evil underlings with a self-awareness that anticipates the whole era of self-referential comedy that followed.
Bill Pullman was Lone Starr, the Han Solo-type mercenary with a heart he’s reluctant to admit having. Daphne Zuniga was Princess Vespa.
John Candy played Barf, the half-man half-dog “mog” who was Lone Starr’s best friend, and whose warmth was the emotional counterweight to the chaos around him. John Candy died in 1994.
Joan Rivers voiced Dot Matrix, the C-3PO analog, and died in 2014.
The film is built almost entirely on fourth-wall breaks, direct parody of specific Star Wars scenes, and the energy of a filmmaker who loved the genre he was mocking.
Brooks had done this before, Young Frankenstein, Blazing Saddles, High Anxiety, and Spaceballs stands alongside those films as one of the clearest expressions of what he understood about comedy. That the joke lands hardest when it comes from genuine familiarity and affection, not contempt.
The film ended with a character breaking the fourth wall to announce a sequel: “Spaceballs 3: The Search for Spaceballs 2.”
For the next 38 years, whenever anyone asked Brooks about a sequel, he said it would be called “Spaceballs 2: The Search for More Money.” This was the joke. The joke ran for nearly four decades.
The Return Of Rick Moranis
The most significant single fact about Spaceballs: The New One, for anyone who grew up with the original, is that Rick Moranis is back.
He has not had a major film role since the early 1990s. He stepped away from Hollywood after the death of his wife Ann Belsky in 1991 to raise their children, and the industry mostly respected his absence as a choice rather than a decline.
He has made occasional brief appearances, a Super Bowl commercial, small roles here and there, but nothing that represented a real return until this.
In 2024, Josh Gad captioned an Instagram post about finishing a script with, “Just handed in a film script that I think may be the funniest and best thing I’ve ever worked on and I am so freaking excited.”
That was the first public signal that the project was real. When Moranis’s involvement was confirmed, it confirmed something larger, that this was not a cynical cash-in but a project that people who know what Spaceballs means actually wanted to make.
At CinemaCon, Moranis was there in person, clearly in good humor about every joke being made at his expense, and clearly healthy and engaged.
He never got to say what he wanted to say, which was entirely the point. That he was there at all, trying to say it, is the thing.
