Shawn Levy, the family-comedy director Disney now trusts with Star Wars and Marvel

Shawn Levy

Photo: Gage Skidmore / CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	July 23, 1968 Montreal, Quebec, Canada
Occupation	Film director and producer
Known for	Deadpool & Wolverine, Free Guy, Real Steel
Awards	Producers Guild of America · TIFF Tribute Awards Norman Jewison · CinemaCon Director of the Year

Two of the most closely guarded franchises in Hollywood now pass through the same pair of hands. Shawn Levy is finishing Star Wars: Starfighter for Lucasfilm and preparing Marvel’s Ghost Rider, with Ryan Gosling at the center of both and Jonathan Tropper writing both scripts. For a filmmaker the industry long filed under family comedy, that is an unusual kind of trust. It also sharpens the question his career has never quite settled: whether the crowd-pleasing instinct that earned it is a craft or a ceiling.

The shorthand on Levy used to be simple. He was the director a studio called when it needed a holiday release with a star on the poster and a family in every row, the man behind Night at the Museum and Cheaper by the Dozen. Then came the long second act that rarely makes the shorthand: producing Stranger Things for Netflix from its first episode to its last, and steering Deadpool & Wolverine into the biggest R-rated hit ever released. Neither fits the old label. Neither has fully replaced it.

He wanted to act before he wanted to direct. Levy grew up in a Jewish family in Montreal, where he was born on July 23, 1968, and as a teenager at St. George’s High School he trained at Stagedoor Manor, the performing-arts camp in New York’s Catskills. He went on to the performing arts program at Yale, graduating in 1989.

The acting years were brief and mostly small. He played the leader of a pack of teenagers in Zombie Nightmare, a low-budget horror film later skewered on Mystery Science Theater 3000. A guest spot on 21 Jump Street and a recurring part on Beverly Hills, 90210 followed while he was already drifting toward the other side of the camera; he moved to Los Angeles to study directing and earned an MFA from the USC School of Cinematic Arts in 1994. He still slips into cameos in his own work, down to a morgue worker in Stranger Things.

His real apprenticeship was children’s television. Through the late 1990s he directed episodes of The Secret World of Alex Mack and Animorphs, and became the principal director of the Disney Channel series The Famous Jett Jackson, which he also executive produced in its third season. The features came quickly after that. Big Fat Liar, his first theatrical release, opened in 2002; Just Married took more than $100 million at the box office the following year; and by Christmas 2003 he had Steve Martin presiding over twelve children in Cheaper by the Dozen.

Night at the Museum turned that formula into a franchise. Ben Stiller as a night guard watching the exhibits wake up, with Robin Williams as a waxwork Theodore Roosevelt, made it one of the highest-grossing films of 2006, and Levy directed both sequels, the last in 2014. He reunited with Martin for The Pink Panther, paired Steve Carell and Tina Fey in Date Night, and in Real Steel put Hugh Jackman in a robot-boxing drama executive produced by Steven Spielberg. His company, 21 Laps, was based at 20th Century Fox until 2020.

The more revealing choices were the ones he made as a producer. 21 Laps backed The Spectacular Now for A24 and then Arrival, Denis Villeneuve‘s film about a linguist trying to talk to visitors from space, which brought Levy a Best Picture nomination. The same year, 2016, the company launched Stranger Things, the Duffer brothers’ supernatural series set in small-town Indiana. Levy executive produced all five seasons, directed the third and fourth episodes of each of the first four, and shared the Producers Guild award for the first. In December 2017 he signed an exclusive television deal with Netflix that kept him there for nearly a decade.

The last turn came through actors. Jackman introduced him to Ryan Reynolds, and the pairing produced Free Guy, a comedy about a video-game extra who wakes up to his own existence that grossed $331.5 million worldwide in 2021, and then The Adam Project for Netflix. He followed it by directing the Netflix limited series All the Light We Cannot See. Reynolds and Jackman then shared the screen in Deadpool & Wolverine, which Levy co-wrote, directed and produced for Marvel Studios. It grossed $1.338 billion in 2024.

That figure is where the argument about Levy starts rather than ends. Reviews of his films have tended to land a notch below their box office: Real Steel drew a mixed response, and critics of Deadpool & Wolverine praised Reynolds, Jackman and the jokes while finding less to admire in the film as a whole. The easy reading is that Levy builds for the cheer rather than the scene, and that franchise work rewards exactly that. It is half right. The producer who put his name on Arrival was not chasing a formula, and the Toronto International Film Festival made him the first recipient of its Norman Jewison Award for career achievement in 2023. The sharper bruise came this year, when the final season of Stranger Things was left out of the Emmy race for best drama series after every earlier season had been nominated.

None of that slowed the next commission. Lucasfilm announced Star Wars: Starfighter in April 2025: a standalone adventure set roughly five years after the end of the Skywalker saga, with Gosling in the lead, due in cinemas on May 28, 2027. At San Diego Comic-Con in July 2026, Marvel Studios revealed that Levy would direct Gosling again in Ghost Rider, dated for July 28, 2028. Linus Sandgren is set to shoot it on film, production is expected to begin in New York next year, and Connor Storrie is in talks to play the villain. In late September, Variety reported that Levy and 21 Laps had signed an overall deal with Disney’s 20th Television, starting in October 2027 and closing a Netflix run that began in 2017.

Away from the set, Levy has been married to his wife, Serena, since 1995, and they have four daughters. He became a United States citizen in 2008. After years in Los Angeles the family moved to Manhattan in the early 2020s, and since 2009 they have kept a home in New Paltz, in the Hudson Valley.

The calendar ahead is the clearest verdict anyone has offered on him. Star Wars: Starfighter arrives first and Ghost Rider a year later, after three decades in which Levy was taken for a mere craftsman of the crowd. Disney is now wagering two of its most valuable names that the crowd was the point all along.