The Mandalorian and Grogu came out in May and it felt like the exact film it was always going to be. Not bad, just not quite enough.
The Rotten Tomatoes audience score for the movie landed at 87%, which is actually the highest any Disney-era Star Wars film has ever gotten from fans. The Mando and Grogu dynamic is still warm and fun, and fans clearly still care about these two characters a lot. What didn't work as well (at least for me, and apparently for a lot of critics) is that the whole thing felt like a very big episode of the TV show.
The second act of the movie drags. Din Djarin doesn't get pushed anywhere particularly new as a character. Even the fight scenes felt surprisingly dull despite the budget behind them. These were recurring complaints and having followed the show through its three seasons, none of that surprised me. The Mandalorian season 3 had similar issues.
At the box office, it opened to around $100 million domestically over the Memorial Day four-day weekend. Above expectations but also, adjusted for inflation, one of the weakest live-action Star Wars openings since The Phantom Menace in 1999. Globally, it came in at $165 million opening weekend, which is roughly where Solo: A Star Wars Story started. Solo is remembered as something of the franchise's cautionary tale.
Starfighter is the next Star Wars for the theaters
The next Star Wars cinematic installment is Starfighter, out May 28, 2027, and it'll be led by none other than Ryan Gosling who is coming off one of the bigger sci-fi success stories in recent memory: Project Hail Mary. Released earlier this year, the movie adapted Andy Weir's novel about a science teacher who wakes up alone in space with no memory of how he got there.
It opened to $80.5 million domestically, crossed $650 million globally, and holds a 94% critics score and 95% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes. Viewers genuinely loved Gosling's performance for the warmth, the humor, and the way he made a fairly nerdy survival story feel so emotionally resonant.
To me, it was one of the more satisfying films of the last few years, and clearly many people felt the same way. The most interesting thing about its success is that audiences will absolutely show up in big numbers for a well-made, character-driven sci-fi film if it actually gives them something to feel. This is also very important for what Starfighter is being asked to do.
Starfighter will have no legacy characters
Starfighter is directed by Shawn Levy and written by Jonathan Tropper, set roughly five years after The Rise of Skywalker in a part of the Star Wars timeline that hasn't been explored on screen before. No legacy characters are confirmed (though there are rumors it could connect to Rey's effort to rebuild the Jedi Order).
Gosling plays a "renowned pilot and war hero" as a new original character with no prior Star Wars history attached. The supporting cast includes Mia Goth as a force-sensitive mercenary with her own agenda (reportedly not a Sith, more of a grey-area figure similar to characters from Ahsoka), House of the Dragon star Matt Smith as the main villain, and Amy Adams as the mother of Gosling's character's young nephew, played by newcomer Flynn Gray.
Aaron Pierre, Daniel Ings, Simon Bird, and Jamael Westman are also in the film.
The official synopsis reads: "In a rebuilding galaxy, a solitary pilot becomes entangled in a crucial mission as new threats emerge. Their journey may alter the future of the Force itself." That's vague, but the "rebuilding galaxy" concept interests me.
Plot leaks suggest the story involves Gosling's character transporting his nephew across the galaxy to find someone capable of training the boy, possibly leading to Rey Skywalker. If true, it would bridge the gap between the existing timeline and whatever Lucasfilm is building toward next.
Starfighter has the opportunity
To me, the core issue with Disney-era Star Wars has been a reluctance to commit fully to new things. The best works like Andor and the first two seasons of The Mandalorian came when the franchise stopped looking backwards.
Starfighter seems, on paper, like a genuine attempt at something new. It will have new characters in a new era, a director with actual cinematic vision and a lead who just proved he can carry a big sci-fi film on charm and performance alone without a pre-existing fanbase to fall back on.
But I think the ingredients here are genuinely better than anything Star Wars has put together for a theatrical release in a long time. And after Mando and Grogu saw that even a beloved fan-approved story can struggle to feel like a proper cinematic event, Starfighter has some real pressure to make things right. Whether it does or doesn't, it's the most interested I've felt in a Star Wars film in years.
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