The Mandalorian and Grogu

Star Wars

It remains a bizarre decision for the first new Star Wars movie in 6.5 years to be what is effectively a reboot of three seasons of a TV show, but that’s what we’re getting with The Mandalorian and Grogu. The trailers have been hit or miss, but ahead of its May 22 release, we have our first actual clip from the movie. Needless to say, it is not lighting the Star Wars fandom on fire.

The clip, which features a landspeeder chase where Grogu is attempting, and failing, to help by shooting missiles from Mando’s parked ship at his Stormtrooper pursuers. It was presented by The Mandalorian and Grogu director Jon Favreau on Jimmy Kimmel. The 45-second clip in question is at minute nine of this video of the full interview:

The most common complaint here, and one I agree with, is that it looks cheap. Like just another episode of The Mandalorian, and not even one of the good ones, which can occasionally look like blockbuster movies. Though that’s been increasingly rare.

We’ve heard other things about how this film came together, where the original plan was for there to be a season 4, complete with already-written scripts, which were going to have Mando go up against Grand Admiral Thrawn as a way to tie the show into season 2 of Ahsoka. Jon Favreau spoke to SFX Magazine about the initial concept:

"You can't just take those scripts and turn them into a movie," Favreau said. "There were a lot of characters, it assumed you'd watched the whole show, and it was teeing up what was happening moving into [the second season of ] Ahsoka. It was about Grand Admiral Thrawn and following the larger storyline [of this era of the Star Wars timeline]."

While the current iteration of a “reboot” of the concept of The Mandalorian seems risky for this film, I’m not sure fans would have been wild about a declining-in-quality Mando show trying to link up with a larger Ahsoka storyline, a series that will have around three years in between seasons by the time it airs. And Mando season 4 probably wouldn’t have arrived until three years after season 3, which is now, given that the show previously aired on March 1, 2023. Instead, we have this movie, and Ahsoka, whatever it’s doing, will stand on its own as a passion project of Dave Filoni, who will be co-leading all of Lucasfilm and in charge of its creative direction.

The Mandalorian and Grogu recently did not make the top 10 list of Fandango’s most-anticipated movies of the summer, and the idea of it being another billion-dollar-earning Star Wars movie, as all but one of the Disney ones were, seems wildly out of reach. The good news here is that with a budget of reportedly $166 million, that’s the lowest Disney has spent making one of its films. The bad news is that you can tell.

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Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.