There is a headline being quietly pre-written around The Mandalorian and Grogu right now, and it goes something like this: Lowest-Grossing Disney-Era Star Wars Movie.
The tracking supports it. Box Office Theory has Jon Favreau’s film projected for a $70 to $85 million domestic opening, which would open below Solo: A Star Wars Story‘s $84.4 million debut and make it the softest first weekend of any Disney-owned Star Wars release. That’s a real, defensible narrative. Write it; file it.
But before that headline goes out wearing the much bigger phrase “lowest-grossing Star Wars movie” without qualifiers, it’s worth remembering that there is a trophy case underneath all this, and the trophy is currently held by a movie most people have completely forgotten exists.
Meet Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008)
Star Wars: The Clone Wars came out in August 2008, directed by a young animator named Dave Filoni. (Hold that name — it’s going to matter a lot in a minute.) It grossed $68 million worldwide, making it the only Star Wars film in the entire franchise, live-action or animated, to not clear $100 million at the box office. By a wide margin.
It carries an 18% on Rotten Tomatoes — the lowest score of any film in the franchise, lower than any prequel, any sequel, lower than The Last Jedi by roughly 72 percentage points, lower than Solo, lower than anything. The critics’ consensus described it as “a pale shadow of George Lucas’ once great franchise.” Metacritic: 35 out of 100. Audience score: 41%.
It was not, in any traditional sense, a movie. The Clone Wars was functionally the pilot of an upcoming Cartoon Network animated series of the same name, stitched together from the first few episodes, upgraded to a theatrical release by Lucas on what seems to have been fairly short notice, and shipped out through Warner Bros. (Disney didn’t buy Lucasfilm for another four years.)
How short was the notice? This is my favorite detail in the entire Star Wars business history: the decision to theatricalize The Clone Wars was made so suddenly that Lucas Licensing didn’t have time to activate any of its usual marketing partners. When The New York Times called Pepsi in July 2008 — one month before the movie came out — for comment, the spokesperson didn’t know a new Star Wars film was being released. Pepsi. Didn’t know. There was a Star Wars movie. Coming out in four weeks.
That is the floor The Mandalorian and Grogu would have to dig beneath to become the lowest-grossing Star Wars movie, full stop. And it is, to put it charitably, not a floor anyone is going to touch.
Why Mando & Grogu Can’t Actually Lose to This
The symmetry between 2008 and 2026 is almost funny on paper. Both films are feature-length extensions of Star Wars television properties. Both were produced primarily as ways to service a TV franchise. Both raised some version of the question: was this really a movie, or just TV content in a bigger package?
But the floor comparison falls apart the second you look at the actual business.
Clone Wars was produced on a reported $8 million budget and released in August — traditionally Hollywood’s dumping ground, at the tail end of summer. The Mandalorian and Grogu is a $166 million Memorial Day release. It has Pedro Pascal. It has Sigourney Weaver in a villain role. It has an IMAX and premium large-format rollout. It has, crucially, Grogu — a character who moves plush toys and branded cereal in ways that a 2008 animated Ahsoka Tano introduction simply did not.
Even the floor of the $70–85 million projected opening weekend exceeds Clone Wars’ entire worldwide gross. Domestically. In a Thursday-to-Sunday window.
For The Mandalorian and Grogu to actually challenge Clone Wars for the title of Lowest-Grossing Star Wars Movie Ever, the movie would need to experience one of the most catastrophic theatrical collapses in modern blockbuster history. Multiple Marvels-level disappointments stacked on top of each other. A critical savaging and an actual theater-emptying word of mouth. A complete failure of the brand extension on every possible axis, simultaneously.
That is not what anyone is predicting. What analysts are predicting is underperformance — a softer Star Wars opening than Disney wants, with a question mark over whether the brand can still anchor a tentpole. That is a completely different conversation from “lowest-grossing Star Wars movie ever.”
The Full-Circle Part
Here is the thing the draft of this story doesn’t write itself into, but absolutely should.
Star Wars: The Clone Wars — the 18%, $68 million, Pepsi-didn’t-know-it-was-coming 2008 disaster — was directed by Dave Filoni. At the time, he was a 34-year-old animator who had been hired to help launch an animated TV show and suddenly found himself releasing a feature film. The movie flopped. The TV show it was designed to launch, however, did not. It ran for seven seasons, built a devoted fan base that only grew after the theatrical release was forgotten, and turned Filoni into George Lucas’ hand-picked protégé.
Filoni went on to co-create The Mandalorian with Jon Favreau in 2019. When Kathleen Kennedy stepped down as president of Lucasfilm, Filoni took over as chief creative officer, stepping into the driver’s seat of the entire franchise alongside new Lucasfilm president Lynwen Brennan.
Which means that the worst-grossing Star Wars movie in history and the soon-to-be-newest Star Wars movie in history are both, in different ways, his.
The man who directed the last Star Wars TV-to-theater experiment is now overseeing the next one, eighteen years later, on a roughly 20-times-larger budget, with the benefit of every lesson the intervening years have taught Lucasfilm about what at-home audiences will and will not pay to see in a theater.
That’s the real story to keep an eye on, and the reason the “lowest-grossing Star Wars movie” framing is a little misleading without a footnote. The real number to watch next to The Mandalorian and Grogu‘s opening weekend isn’t Clone Wars’$68 million. It’s Solo‘s $393 million worldwide. It’s Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania‘s $476 million. It’s The Marvels‘ $206 million.
Those are the comparables for a softening tentpole.
Clone Wars isn’t a comparable. Clone Wars is a historical curiosity. And barring a complete collapse of the Star Wars brand in the next 30 days, it’s going to hold onto its weird little trophy for a while yet.
