With the first trailer for The Mandalorian and Grogu released, the Star Wars franchise is officially beginning its journey back to the big-screen after a seven-year-long hiatus. However, the series has been far from dormant during this period.
Instead of theatrical features, amidst the divisive reception to The Rise of Skywalker, Disney and Lucasfilm opted to pivot the franchise entirely to streaming TV series’ for the freshly launched streaming platform, Disney+. This resulted in a slew of Star Wars-adjacent content hitting the streaming service over the last several years, and has all culminated in Jon Favreau’s The Mandalorian getting his own movie, in the form of The Mandalorian and Grogu.
And sure, from a business perspective, it’s no real surprise that the series that was unambiguously the most successful and crowd-pleasing is the one that’s getting the movie treatment. But from a creative perspective, this decision is an absolute head scratcher.
For starters, at Star Wars Celebration 2023, several new Star Wars films were announced, none of which have actually come to fruition yet. One of these was a Mandalorian-related movie from writer-director Dave Filoni, which was set to act as a crossover between The Mandalorian and other shows set in the same time period, such as Ahsoka and The Book of Boba Fett. While that movie was being prepped, Disney suddenly announced that Favreau’s previously planned fourth season of the Mandalorian TV show was scrapped, and instead, they would be focusing on this new movie. But of all the potential options that the Disney+ Star Wars shows provided, The Mandalorian and Grogu seems poised to explore the least interesting one possible.
Part of this is due to the fact that from everything we’ve seen thus far, The Mandalorian and Grogu just feels largely rudderless. The trailer plays a like a greatest hits reel from the TV series more so than it does a debuting of footage from a new movie; everything looks the same, it’s showcasing many of the same things, and even goes out of its way to deliberately undo the consequences of choices made in the latter seasons of the show (such as reverting to Din Djarin’s earlier seasons ship, The Razorcrest, even though it was blown up). At best, its safe to say The Mandalorian and Grogu will merely be an adventure with these characters, not the big cinematic adventure that demanded to be seen on the big-screen.
Other Star Wars shows would make better movies
In stark contrast, there are numerous other Star Wars shows that could benefit greatly from having a feature film that could double as their proper conclusion, delivering high-stakes narratives with intense emotionality and catharsis. Most recently, Skeleton Crew closed out its first season with some pretty large narrative threads still left unresolved, and has yet to get any kind of announcement on a second season.
As such, a Skeleton Crew movie would be stellar, and considering the immensely talented team behind that show, including the likes of David Lowery and Academy Award-winners the Daniels, there’s little doubt that the team could deliver a truly cinematic movie.
Of course, the truly obvious answer for which Star Wars show could have most benefitted from a film is the cancelled High Republic-set The Acolyte. The prequel series began to properly explore gargantuan parts of the larger Star Wars mythos in its first season and even delivered fan-favorite characters such as Amandla Stenberg as Osha and Manny Jacinto as The Stranger. It ended on a huge cliffhanger, teasing the role of franchise legend Darth Plagueis in a later story, but was then unceremoniously cancelled by Lucasfilm. A film would be a natural place to conclude the story that Leslye Headland and her team began telling in the first season, the director and her stunt coordinator Christopher Cowan continue to top themselves in terms of the massive lightsaber battles they would be able to deliver on the big screen.
Instead, the Star Wars franchise is returning to the big screen with The Mandalorian and Grogu, an adventure that feels tangential at best and somehow less crucial than many of the events that have already unfolded within the TV series itself. Given just how low-stakes all of this feels, it can’t help but leave you wishing Lucasfilm and Disney would have been a bit bolder if they were really interested in mining the streaming series' for possible cinematic options.