Yes, the last Star Wars movie made $1 billion, however it had to crawl to that milestone at the end of the last “normal” year for moviegoing in 2019. Since then the 2020s have brought us a pandemic, shifting moviegoing tastes, and a series of costly streaming wars which left even Star Wars’ most reliable stablemate at Disney, the Marvel Cinematic Universe, in a weakened state. In fact, the most recent MCU film, November’s The Marvels, flopped. And like The Mandolorian & Grogu, that superhero flick relied on casual moviegoers already being invested in characters who were introduced on the small screen.
This is perhaps the biggest question mark (and maybe opportunity?) facing Mandalorian & Grogu. While there have been no Star Wars movies for the past five years—and there won’t be one for at least six by the time Favreau’s Mando flick comes out—the brand has been omnipresent on Disney+. The Mandalorian, The Book of Boba Fett, Obi-Wan Kenobi, Andor, and Ahsoka are just a few of the series the Mouse House has flooded its streaming service with. However, the same phenomenon has visibly tired some audiences on the Marvel brand. Disney CEO Bob Iger even admitted last year that the company had placed a value on quantity over quality.
So while audiences didn’t seem to mind (at least while buying their tickets) that Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness only made sense if you saw WandaVision, they were less amused that the little-watched Ms. Marvel was also required viewing for The Marvels. Additionally, The Rise of Skywalker was heavily marketed on nostalgia in 2019 for “the Skywalker Saga” (i.e. all the characters and stories audiences had cared about for the past 40 years). However, the attempt to do a Han Solo movie without Harrison Ford one year earlier led to the first Star Wars movie in history to flop at the box office. This also followed what was a divided fan response (at least online) toward The Last Jedi.
In other words, the Star Wars brand was showing extreme vulnerability even before a long hiatus from cinemas. And in that time, audience interest in older IP brands like Marvel, DC, Fast and Furious, and even Lucasfilm’s other legendary property, Indiana Jones, has demonstrably waned.
Nonetheless, there is greater potential in The Mandalorian & Grogu than there was in most of Hollywood’s recent long-running misfires. While the new Star Wars flick is a spinoff of a Disney+ TV show, it is still a spinoff of what was at least a major hit on Disney+. It is estimated by Nielsen that Disney+ subscribers have collectively viewed The Mandalorian for more than a billion minutes. The Mandalorian was also reportedly the most-watched streaming original of 2023. It may be a TV spinoff, but The Mandalorian & Grogu spins off from one of the few streaming series that can still qualify as being a “watercooler show.”
Furthermore, to an entire younger generation of Star Wars fans, Mando and his Force-sensitive sidekick are Star Wars. Thanks to Favreau and Filoni, millions of children (aka Disney’s core demographic) have been introduced to Star Wars not as the big-screen adventures of Luke Skywalker, or the greater tragedy of the House of Skywalker, but as those Disney+ shows where the bounty hunter in a cool suit is at the center of a web of TV shows. Mando and Grogu are essentially the new center of gravity for the Star Wars brand.
