On the face of it, The Mandalorian and Grogu should be a force to be reckoned with. The Star Wars movie is headlined by one of the most popular characters in the history of the franchise and follows up the most successful streaming series in the sci-fi saga since Disney bought its rightsholder Lucasfilm in 2012. However, industry estimates suggest that the new film is set for a similar domestic opening to 2018’s Solo, Disney’s biggest Star Wars flop on the silver screen. There is good reason for this.
The Mandalorian and Grogu stars Pedro Pascal as the eponymous armor-clad adventurer who is joined by his alien sidekick Grogu on a quest to apprehend a warlord and rescue Rotta the Hutt, the long-lost son of iconic Star Wars villain Jabba the Hutt. It is essentially a sequel to The Mandalorian, the Star Wars streaming series which debuted to rave reviews on the Disney+ platform in November 2019.
The show introduced the pointy-eared green alien Grogu who took the world by storm thanks to its cute appearance and resemblance to classic Star Wars character Yoda. The Mandalorian returned to the roots of the saga as it featured much more rustic settings than those seen in Disney’s Star Wars movies. Unusually, its storylines were inspired by westerns which won over fans and critics alike. It earned the first season a total of seven Primetime Creative Arts Emmy Awards including the prestigious category of Outstanding Cinematography For A Single-Camera Series.
In light of this success, a second season was inevitable and it managed to top the original by introducing a de-aged version of Star Wars celebrity Luke Skywalker in its December 2020 finale. A young likeness of actor Mark Hamill was flawlessly recreated on screen sending fans into a frenzy and leading to The Mandalorian becoming the first program on a streaming platform other than Netflix to claim the top spot on Nielsen’s rankings. The second season scored the same number of Emmy awards as its predecessor but then came a disturbance in the force.
The third series of The Mandalorian won just one Emmy – in the Outstanding Stunt Performance category – and became the first to face a backlash from fans. The first two seasons both earned an audience score of over 90% on review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes but the third plummeted to just 51%. It wasn’t driven by online trolls.
James Hibberd of The Hollywood Reporter wrote that there was “some credence to the blowback” as the complaints weren’t centered around one specific issue. Hibberd explained that there were “a miasma of grievances ranging from plotting and dialogue to unconvincing special effects to jarring cameos” including ones from Christopher Lloyd and Jack Black, which he described as “campy”.
According to Nielsen, the third season opened to 823 million minutes of viewing which was 20% lower than the premiere of the second series despite the Mandalorian and his diminutive sidekick still being front and center. It appeared that audiences were beginning to tire of their adventures but Disney wasn’t deterred.
By the time that the 2023 Hollywood strikes came around, executive producer Jon Favreau had already fully written the script for season four but during the production pause Lucasfilm re-evaluated its upcoming slate.
As this report revealed, the profits of Disney’s Star Wars films steadily declined across its trilogy so Lucasfilm wanted a safe bet to bring the series back to the big screen. The Mandalorian seemed to be as safe as they come so Favreau crafted a new narrative for the movie, noting that you can’t simply condense a multi-hour television show into a two-hour theatrical film. It appears he did too good a job.
In order to maximize the potential audience, Favreau ensured that viewers didn’t need to have watched the first three seasons of the show. As a result, his film doesn’t affect the wider Star Wars universe. The movie is designed to be a standalone production and some critics have complained that this makes it feel isolated and pointless with low stakes.
On the one hand that makes sense but on the other it shows the challenge of creating a new instalment in a series with as much baggage as Star Wars. Disney’s Marvel Cinematic Universe is no different and, justifiably, one of the biggest criticisms of its movies is that viewers need to have watched so many of them to understand what is happening. Favreau tried to avoid that but, ironically, it was his undoing.
The Mandalorian and Grogu currently has a critics’ score of just 62% on Rotten Tomatoes though audiences have been more generous, awarding it 89%. The critics’ consensus hints at the core of the problem as it says the movie is “bountiful in action but threadbare in narrative thrust with its episodic structure.”
Although it was written bespoke for the big screen, audiences aren’t used to watching The Mandalorian in the movie theater. They aren’t even used to watching Star Wars in the summer as Disney released all of its trilogy in the month of December. The only exception was Solo which was also released in May and ended up having the lowest gross of any of Disney’s Star Wars movies. It was also the only one which made a loss at the box office so it perhaps wasn’t the best model for Disney to follow with The Mandalorian and Grogu.
There is no doubt that audiences aren’t looking for The Mandalorian and Grogu now as much as they have in the past. The evidence for this is in the graph below which is based on information from internet search giant Google. Its Google Trends service analyzes the popularity of top queries though the results don’t reveal the number of searches for a specific term. Instead, each point on the graph is relative to the others on a scale of zero to 100. A score of 50 means there were half as many searches for the term on that date than there were when it hit 100, which represents peak popularity. In contrast, a score of zero relates to the lowest number of search enquiries during the given time.
Google processes more than five trillion inquiries annually giving it a 90% share of the market so the results are as comprehensive as can be. Crucially, Google Trends captures as many of them as possible as it is not case sensitive and shows worldwide search inquiries.
It is possible to search for a specific name such as ‘The Mandalorian and Grogu’ but in order to get the clearest indication of the popularity of the subject over time, the most logical term to use is simply ‘Mandalorian’. The most notable projects which have used that term over the past seven years are the streaming series and the movie. The results show that despite the release of the movie, there have been fewer searches for Mandalorian in May than during the months when the three seasons of the show ended.
The number of searches peaked at 100 in December 2020, coinciding with the debut on screen of the de-aged Luke Skywalker. That was closely followed by the finale of the first season in December 2019 which had a Google Trends value of 87. The third season ended on the lowest note with a Google Trends score of just 37 but even this is higher than the current level of 26. Even restricting the search to news sites doesn’t propel the total to higher than the tally for the season two finale despite the current news cycle containing reviews of the movie.
Making the film after the decline in interest in the third season was always going to be a gamble but that wasn’t the only risk factor. In general, films which are based on TV series, and star the same cast, have a patchy track record. Aside from 2007’s The Simpsons Movie, which was animated, the highest-grossing movie based on a TV series was Sex and the City in 2008 which made $418.8 million. It was a respectable sum for an R-rated franchise but not for Star Wars. To put it in perspective, Sex and the City only grossed $25.9 million more than Solo which is firmly considered a flop, losing more than $100 million at the box office.
At the opposite end of the spectrum to Sex and the City was Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me, David Lynch’s surreal 1992 prequel to his phenomenally-popular TV series. In stark contrast, the movie was a notorious box office bomb and grossed just $4.2 million worldwide. Released just a year after the series was abruptly canceled, the movie was widely criticised for being too dark and confusing for casual viewers.
It is further evidence that if a TV show has a fervent fan base that doesn’t guarantee it will translate into a blockbuster movie. Compounding the problem is the fact that The Mandalorian was already made to movie-caliber production standards as this report explained. As a result, The Mandalorian and Grogu looks no different to an episode of the show which somewhat diminishes its scale and significance. Moreover, it could subliminally encourage viewers to wait for the movie to appear on Disney+ which is where they are used to watching the show.
For all these reasons, industry estimates suggest that The Mandalorian and Grogu is looking at a $102 million four-day opening, which is roughly what Solo opened to before going on to gross just $392.9 million worldwide.
It is tough to tell what The Mandalorian and Grogu needs to gross to break even. Unlike all of Disney’s other Star Wars movies, it was not made in the United Kingdom where studios disclose precise production spending as part of the process of getting a partial reimbursement of costs. Instead, the movie was made in California as the show is usually filmed there.
California Film Commission records list approximately $166.4 million in “qualified California production expenditures” for the film which would make it the cheapest instalment in the Star Wars series by far. Records in the U.K., which only cover production costs, not marketing expenditure, show that the cheapest Star Wars movie Disney made there was 2016 spinoff film Rogue One at $327.5 million (£240 million). The Mandalorian and Grogu may not actually be that far behind.
Talking to leading entertainment news outlet, That Park Place, expert film industry pundit Valliant Renegade noted that the qualified expenditure may not be the same as the total production budget which could be a lot higher. He added that “Disney is spending an extraordinary amount of money to market Mando & Grogu. $165M in production and another $130M+ in Global P&A. They’re gonna need $600M in retail box to cover that.”
If the stars align and it reaches that total, Favreau’s script for a fourth season could finally see the light of day on the small screen. If not, that still doesn’t mean the movie won’t serve a purpose as it promotes high-margin Star Wars merchandise to viewers and even non-viewers who watch the welter of ads for the film.
Disney has even re-themed one of the rides at its theme parks in the United States to the new movie. Of course, there is no way to quantify how much Star Wars merchandise is shifted by the movie or how many people it attracts to the parks. However, it does show that even though the force may not be strong in theaters, the film could still have a happy ending.
