Star Wars returns to theaters with “The Mandalorian and Grogu” A project that bridges the gap to the future of the saga

Three years after its last season was released on Disney+, The Mandalorian and Grogu arrives in cinemas, an adventure centered on characters from the Star Wars universe that are soaring at the box office — one week after its release, it had reached around 161 million dollars worldwide — and are trying to relaunch the saga in cinemas. Indeed, the film directed by Jon Favreau, creator of the original show, could manage to do so, as it is one of the blockbuster phenomena of the year, especially if the title is able to maintain solid momentum and continue gathering viewers and ticket sales in the coming weeks.

A theatrical release that, for Lucasfilm, is more an attempt to test the waters than an authentic relaunch of the franchise. A first seed to see what will happen and how to move in the future, with one of its most important releases scheduled for 2027. Let’s take a step back: in 2019, The Mandalorian was released on Disney+, bringing around ten million users to subscribe to the platform — in Italy, we would have to wait until March 31, 2020 for the streaming service. The show was a success. A story that, as happened with the 1977 space opera, managed to bring together two very clear imaginaries: science fiction among galaxies and western settings, especially vivid and dusty in Favreau’s series.

The one who won everyone over was Baby Yoda, a character we would only later discover was called Grogu. And so Din Djarin, the Mandalorian bounty hunter played by Pedro Pascal, and his new little friend — with whom he would develop, over the course of the episodes, something closer to a father-son relationship — embarked on three seasons that ended in 2023 and for which a fourth was planned.

The strike by screenwriters that same year and the handover from Kathleen Kennedy to Dave Filoni as president of Lucasfilm, however, led to major changes, including the reconsideration of the project for another season of The Mandalorian, transforming it into a possible film. A lure for the world of Star Wars that is, today, necessary to study what to do and what not to do in the future, since during the Covid and post-Covid period the saga had largely settled into Disney+’s streaming container, releasing more or less a dozen serial products, not always considered particularly worthy by critics and audiences.

The Mandalorian and Grogu therefore ended up serving as a sentinel, sent ahead to test the ground. For seven years, cinemas had not seen a Star Wars work projected on the big screen. The last had been Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, released the same year as the first season of The Mandalorian, which, despite being the final chapter of a controversial modern trilogy, ended its run with one billion dollars earned globally — still a loss if we consider that The Force Awakens, the 2015 opener, had earned twice as much.

Next year, the saga is betting everything on the new title Star Wars: Starfighter, directed by Shawn Levy (Stranger Things, Deadpool & Wolverine) and starring a leading name such as Ryan Gosling. A production that first needs a title capable of getting audiences used again to seeing the franchise’s products in cinemas, so that it can truly explode with this combined firepower.

Not that The Mandalorian and Grogu was sent into battle unarmed. The film, however, had a modest budget when compared to the investments that usually swirl around the saga’s cinematic titles: here, “only” 167 million, so at present the 161 million at the box office in its first week is not much, but neither is it a negative sign. With Star Wars: Starfighter, whose budget has not yet been confirmed but is imagined to be around 200-300 million dollars, excluding the costs of the marketing campaign.

To make another comparison, at the time The Force Awakens could count on an investment of 306 million, a budget that had to take into account the main actors and the need to do things on a grand scale in order to relaunch the saga after ten years. It should also be considered that, more than some other independent titles in the Star Wars universe — with The Mandalorian and Starfighter among the first cinema products detached from the Skywalker legacy — The Mandalorian and Grogu came from a serial container from which it is easier to gather viewers, but not enough to create a true phenomenon in cinemas.

It is, in fact, a work inevitably linked to the events that happened in the previous episodes, and for this reason it may not encourage viewing from those who have never seen even a single episode of the show. This is also why the screenplay of the work, written by Favreau, Filoni and Noah Kloor — who contributed to both The Mandalorian and The Book of Boba Fett — is a hybrid between the prior knowledge a fan may have and a film that is nevertheless understandable even to those who have never encountered the two characters before.

This could also be the reason why, probably, the film feels weakened compared to some episodes of the show, which instead opened up the narrative by allowing moments of real cinema to breathe, working through an inverse mechanism whereby the feature film does not have the strength of some stories seen over the course of the seasons. A title that therefore serves as a bridge and projects us toward next year. And one that, according to Lucasfilm, does not rule out a possible fourth season of the adventures of Mando and his little helper.