The Super Bowl has, historically, been a great time for upcoming new blockbusters to step into the spotlight. With the big game’s broadcast time of February, it often makes for an ideal window for upcoming summer movies to steal away a few crucial minutes of the limelight and debut new footage for the hundreds of millions of people watching. And considering just how costly those few minutes can be (i.e. millions of dollars), these combined forces often bring out the best in people, often resulting in highly compelling ads that captivate the imagination within a short span of time.
For evidence of precisely that this year, one need look no further than something like the excellent spot for Steven Spielberg’s Disclosure Day. However, perhaps the most notable Super Bowl trailer was not one that stood out for its success, but rather for its utter failure, and that was the one for the next Star Wars movie, The Mandalorian and Grogu.
To be frank, I cannot even begin to comprehend what is going on with the marketing of this film in general. It comes out in a matter of months and is the first theatrically-released Star Wars project in seven years; it should be a massive deal, and yet everything about it reads as Disney fumbling what should be easy wins time and again. Prior to this Super Bowl ad, the film had only had one real trailer released. That was months ago, and the trailer was received incredibly poorly, with many fans online criticizing everything from the look to the editing and beyond. On top of that, that trailer didn’t perform well either, barely cracking 10 million views on platforms like YouTube; a paltry figure when compared to previous Star Wars trailers.
So The Mandalorian and Grogu doing a Super Bowl ad makes perfect sense. It’s a golden opportunity to remind avid fans and casual audiences alike just how much they used to love these characters on The Mandalorian streaming series and get excited about seeing them in a big-screen cinematic adventure. But instead of doing any of that, the Super Bowl spot is a bizarrely half-baked attempt at parodying a decades-old Budweiser commercial, that does a whole lot of nothing for nobody. This isn’t the kind of ad that you release if you’re in desperate need of drumming up excitement and goodwill for an upcoming blockbuster; it’s the kind of victory-lap fluff piece you do if you think your success is already in the bag. And allow me to be clear, in the case of The Mandalorian and Grogu, it is very much not.
Yes, audiences once loved these characters and The Mandalorian series, but that was years ago now. Streaming figures have shown that following the combined kerfuffle of The Book of Boba Fett and The Mandalorian season 3, audiences didn’t return to see the further adventures of these characters in the same way. So if you’re going to go all-in on a movie version of this story, every bit of marketing needs to be aimed at getting people back on this bandwagon and also showcasing why this project is uniquely suited for the big screen. Audiences can already get several dozen hours worth of Din Djarin and Grogu at home, so why should they come out to the theater to see this? That’s what the marketing should be communicating, and it has thus far failed at every turn.
The Super Bowl ad really serves as a culmination of all of these failings; an incompetent and out-of-touch spot that is little more than an unfathomable waste of time and money. All of this is made all the stranger considering how generally strong Disney’s marketing has been for Star Wars projects over the years. Even a film as outright awful as The Rise of Skywalker had a boffo marketing campaign. Instead, The Mandalorian and Grogu’s marketing feels painfully reminiscent of Disney Star Wars’ sole swing-and-a-miss at the box office, Solo. For as solid as that film ultimately was, the marketing felt confused and muddled, failing to communicate to audiences what the project was or why they should see it. In very much the same way, we are watching The Mandalorian and Grogu’s marketing flounder in real-time right now.
We'll see the impact it has on the film's success when The Mandalorian and Grogu debuts in theaters on May 22.