Old School. Biblically Independent.
By Mike Redmond | News | May 14, 2026
You'd barely know it, but The Mandalorian & Grogu opens next week, and so far, the box office tracking for this puppy has not been great. Of course, none of this is surprising given there was a time to strike when this iron was hot, and it's definitely not three years after a lackluster third season that drove the show's concept into the ground. Yet, somehow, this is the project that Lucasfilm landed on to bring Star Wars back to theaters.
If those words seem harsh, here's The Mandalorian co-creator Jon Favreau admitting that even he doesn't get why this movie is happening outside of banking on Baby Yoda to get butts in seats. He even drops the Grogu pretense and goes straight for the name everyone knows.
Via Total Film:
"I'm not sure what, exactly, why we were asked to do this," Favreau tells us. "I suspect it was because these are characters that people, even who hadn't seen Star Wars, may be aware of, especially Grogu. Baby Yoda was everywhere. And these are two characters that were used to launch Disney Plus, and we made no assumptions when the Mandalorian TV show came on that anybody had seen any Star Wars before. But we also wanted to make it feel authentic to Star Wars, and so the world that we created as the backdrop and the way the characters present themselves were embraced by Star Wars fans, which I really appreciate. But it also was an inroad for people who may not have ever watched Star Wars on television, and here we are now, seven years after the last film. I think there's an opportunity to present Star Wars to a new audience using these characters as well."
So, basically, Favreau thinks -- and it's incredible that he seems in the dark here -- that The Mandalorian & Grogu exists solely to prime the pump for getting people hooked on seeing Star Wars movies in theaters again. Is using streaming characters who have been available at home for the past 7 years the best way to do that? I guess we'll find out. But at the moment, it's tracking to perform worse than Solo. (No shade towards that movie. It gets a bad rap.)
In the meantime, I love that Favreau basically validated this Onion headline from last month, and hey, it's not too late to make the switch. What's the worst that can happen? The window clings at Burger King don't match? Oh no!
