Super Bowl LXI is getting a ninth way to watch, and this one comes from a galaxy far, far away. The league, Disney and Lucasfilm announced on Monday night, Oct. 19, that the Feb. 14, 2027 game at SoFi Stadium will also be shown as Star Wars Funday Football, a real-time animated version of the game in which the players are rendered as avatars inside the Star Wars universe.
It will be the first animated alternate telecast of a Super Bowl. The animated game will stream live on Disney+ and air on Disney Channel and Disney XD, alongside the main broadcast with Joe Buck, Troy Aikman, Lisa Salters and Laura Rutledge on ABC and Disney+.
Coming soon on Super Bowl Sunday… 👀 https://t.co/Ku4L9Ptc9E
— NFL (@NFL) October 20, 2026
How the animated game works
Every snap of the real game will be recreated as it happens. The animation is driven by the league’s player-tracking chips and Sony’s Hawk-Eye optical tracking, with Sony’s Beyond Sports turning that data into animated gameplay, the same system behind every earlier Funday Football broadcast. Star Wars characters will sub in at key moments, and the producers promise Easter eggs throughout the game.
The first confirmed voice is a familiar one. Anthony Daniels, who played C-3PO in the original 1977 film, returns to voice the droid. The setting, the commentators and the rest of the characters will be announced closer to the game.
The timing is not an accident. Lucasfilm is marking 50 years of Star Wars, and a restored version of the original film returns to theaters on Friday, Feb. 19, five days after the Super Bowl.
The fourth Funday Football, and the biggest
Animated NFL games have become a regular part of the league’s partnership with Disney. The Super Bowl edition follows three regular-season games:
- Toy Story Funday Football: Falcons-Jaguars in London, October 2023, which won three Sports Emmy Awards
- The Simpsons Funday Football: Bengals-Cowboys, December 2024
- Monsters Funday Football: Eagles-Chargers, December 2025
- Star Wars Funday Football: Super Bowl LXI, Feb. 14, 2027
The promotion starts right away. From Tuesday, Oct. 20, the daily SC+ highlights show on Disney+ will run Star Wars-themed “Hyperspace Highlights” of Monday Night Football plays, and starting Oct. 26, an animated Darth Vader will interview a player from that night’s Monday game each week.
Every way to watch Super Bowl LXI so far
The animated feed joins the alternate telecasts announced on Oct. 11, when the league’s own cable channel was given live Super Bowl action for the first time. That plan already spread the game across eight platforms. The current lineup:
- Main telecast: ABC, Disney’s flagship sports channel and Disney+
- Peyton and Eli Manning: ESPN2
- Field Pass with The Pat McAfee Show: ESPNU
- Playbook, the player-tracking stats cast: the league’s own cable channel
- Spanish: Disney+ and Disney’s Spanish-language sports channel, plus a separate Univision presentation
- Star Wars Funday Football: Disney+, Disney Channel and Disney XD
The animated game will also be shown live in markets including Latin America, the Caribbean, Australia and New Zealand, Canada through TSN+, the Netherlands, sub-Saharan Africa, Japan, Sweden, Singapore, Malaysia and the Philippines. It will be available on demand on Disney+ shortly after the final whistle in more regions, among them the United Kingdom, France, Germany and South Korea, for a total of more than 155 markets.
For the league, the appeal is reach. A kids’ channel version of the Super Bowl brings in an audience that may never watch the main broadcast, and every one of those viewers counts toward the total Disney reports for its first Super Bowl. One big announcement is still missing: the halftime headliner has not been named.
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