When it first premiered in 2019, The Mandalorian was nothing short of a miracle. For the first time in history, you could get live-action, movie-quality Star Wars not just at the theater, but also streaming directly into your own home.
Between the unique combination of talents such as Jon Favreau, Dave Filoni, and cinematographer Greig Fraser, and the positioning as a flagship series in tandem with the launch of the Disney+ streaming platform, The Mandalorian quickly became must-see TV. In fact, Din Djarin and the ever-memeable Grogu (simply known as ‘Baby Yoda’ to the audiences at the time) wound up becoming favorites of the franchise, with the show being much more positively received than its cinematic counterpart that year, The Rise of Skywalker.
As such, Disney and Lucasfilm went all-in on making Star Wars content for Disney+, shying away from theatrical releases altogether. While this undoubtedly seemed like a logical choice at the time, it would go on to have grave consequences. Over the next few years, the sheen of getting Star Wars on television wore off, and the market quickly grew oversaturated.
As a result viewership decreased, and Disney became keenly aware that they needed to recalibrate this approach. The first result of this is the franchise’s first return to theaters since 2019; The Mandalorian and Grogu. With the first trailer for the film now released, however, there’s a slight problem: it looks exactly like the TV show.
From a visual perspective, everything about The Mandalorian and Grogu trailer screams “made for Disney+.” This has been a persistent problem with several of Disney’s wide-release films over the last year, with projects like the live-action Lilo & Stitch and Freakier Friday both starting life as Disney+ exclusives, and maintaining that made-for-TV approach to their lighting and production design all the way through to theatrical release.
The Mandalorian and Grogu exhibits this problem in spades, something only further exacerbated by the color and pulpy influences of the poster, all of which are woefully absent from the actual footage, whose primary color palette seems to be dark green, dark gray, and beige. This also makes it a very odd choice to close the trailer with the tagline, “Forged for IMAX,” because the footage could not feel more small-scale. The only exterior shots in the trailer are ones that feel like they were filmed directly outside of The Volume-aided studio, as exhibited by the opening shot which is of a foreign planet that looks suspiciously like the California coast.
Elsewhere, the trailer does little to sell this as a cinematic story. Practically everything featured in the footage here is just a lukewarm riff on things that have already been seen in the series itself. Whether it be Anzellans, Mando taking on Stormtroopers, the appearance of Zeb Orrelios in live-action, Grogu using the Force for quirky and memeable hijinks, or even the presence of more of the Hutts, all of this has been seen in The Mandalorian TV show.
Given that the movie is written and directed by Jon Favreau, who has sole writer credits on the vast majority of the episodes on all seasons of The Mandalorian and even its direct spinoff, The Book of Boba Fett, the familiarity isn’t a huge surprise, but it is disheartening.
From the outset, the concern many fans harbored was that The Mandalorian and Grogu would essentially just be a glorified few episodes of the TV show compacted into a feature-length film, and this trailer does little to assuage such worries. In fact, it all but confirms them.
The Mandalorian and Grogu premieres in theaters on May 22, 2026.