Summary
- The Mandalorian and Grogu faces high expectations as the first theatrically-released Star Wars project in seven years.
- Despite The Mandalorian's success on Disney+, the transition to film presents financial challenges for Disney and Lucasfilm.
- The Mandalorian's move from TV to film reflects Disney's strategy of prioritizing theatrical releases over high-budget original content on Disney+.
At Star Wars Celebration 2025, the monolithic science-fiction franchise teased audiences in attendance with an exclusive first look at its upcoming return to in-theater entertainment: Jon Favreau’s The Mandalorian and Grogu. The film is set to be a culmination of the previous three seasons of The Mandalorian, which streamed on Disney+. However, given its position as the first theatrically-released Star Wars project in seven years, an additional burden of expectation will inevitably be placed upon the movie. As such, The Mandalorian and Grogu has to be more than just an entertaining movie, it has to feel bigger, better, and grander than anything Favreau has done with The Mandalorian up to now.
The Mandalorian’s Unconventional Star Wars History
The Mandalorian series first premiered on Disney+ on November 12, 2019, the same date the streaming service launched. Seeing as the series was the first-ever live-action Star Wars television show, it served as a flagship attraction, to the tune of enticing more than ten million subscribers in the first twenty-four hours. There was a novelty to it; the franchise, which had remained a theatrical, cinematic staple for decades, was now coming into the audience’s living rooms via this new streaming platform. And as it turned out, The Mandalorian would buck expectations and wind up being vastly more successful than anyone had anticipated. As the final installment of the Skywalker Saga, The Rise of Skywalker was premiering in theaters to dire reviews and tepid audience reception, the first season of The Mandalorian, with its creature-of-the-week structure and implementation of instant audience-favorite Grogu (then simply known as ‘Baby Yoda’), became an unproblematic fave for Disney.
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To this end, though the first season of The Mandalorian was a predominantly small-scale affair, which creators Jon Favreau and Dave Filoni frequently likened to ‘playing with hand-me-down action figures,’ they would get a major upgrade come season two. Suddenly, the show was not some unknown entity but rather one of the most easily bankable projects in modern Star Wars history, and Disney went all in on it. The second season had a vastly larger budget, incorporated far more elements from Dave Filoni’s own animated Star Wars work, and even worked in iconic Star Wars legacy characters such as Boba Fett and Luke Skywalker.
The result was a fairly well-received season of television, but as Disney was soon to realize, it wasn’t exactly a lucrative investment. For as much money as was put into this season of the show, Disney made next to no actual profit off of it, as the number of new viewers signing up for Disney+ to watch the show was not enough to offset the costs of running the platform and making the series. Things got even worse when the third season of the show cost even more money a few years later and netted far lower viewership numbers.
Disney's Expensive Streaming Problems With Star Wars And Beyond
As such, Disney and Lucasfilm had a unique problem on their hands: they had this immensely popular sub-franchise featuring characters that had become a bona fide part of the cultural zeitgeist, and yet they were struggling to financially capitalize upon them. This problem was not unique to Star Wars, as the entire Disney brand was left reeling from these same issues. The once veritable blockbuster generator that was Pixar had been reduced to straight-to-streaming films that made no profit. Even recent Disney animated blockbusters, such as Zootopia, received straight-to-streaming sequel TV series that generated no buzz and left no impact.
To combat this, returning Disney CEO Bob Iger chose to reprioritize the company’s investments. Instead of a platform for high-budget new and original content, Iger opted to use Disney+ as an extension of marketing efforts for upcoming theatrical films, in an attempt to maximize profits from those releases. In doing so, he made the choice to pivot several of the company’s already-in-production projects that were slated for Disney+ to be released in theaters instead. Nowhere was this methodology more apparent than in last year’s Moana 2, a film that was a finished season of television that Iger insisted the creative team re-edit into a feature-length release instead. The result was a highly creatively compromised film, but one that earned a billion dollars at the box office. This success only further spurred Iger’s new plans for the brand, and The Mandalorian and Grogu will be the next big test of this mentality.
The Mandalorian Was Essentially Forced To Pivot From TV To Film
By many accounts, a fourth season of The Mandalorian was being actively prepped at Lucasfilm shortly after the release of its third season. After all, by this point, the Star Wars franchise had moved entirely to streaming, with Favreau and Filoni overseeing a bevy of streaming TV shows for Disney+. And while there was a feature-length theatrical movie on the horizon, announced back in 2023, this is not that film. The film that was announced was to be directed by Dave Filoni and be a massive crossover event of all of the various streaming series’ characters. But then, a year later, suddenly a different Mandalorian film was announced with Favreau directing, titled The Mandalorian and Grogu, which was being rushed into production so it could hit theaters in 2026.
It is not a stretch to say that The Mandalorian and Grogu is a highly similar situation to Moana 2; a project that was set to be a television series that, for the financial benefit of the monopolistic company that owns it, has instead been retrofitted for theatrical release. However, whereas Moana 2 was able to capitalize on audiences’ love and nostalgia for the first Moana film to reach such great financial heights, The Mandalorian and Grogu is a very different situation. Audiences are already overtly familiar with what The Mandalorian looks like on the small screen, so this film has to be more than just a condensed season or an elongated episode of television.
Rather, as the first theatrically-released Star Wars film since The Rise of Skywalker, The Mandalorian and Grogu has a tremendous uphill battle to fight. Not only will the film have to simultaneously appease fans of the franchise and entice new audiences to check this film out if it wants to be successful, but it will also have to convince audiences that there’s something unique enough here to lure people out of their homes and back to the theater for this iconic franchise.
