Star Wars hasn’t been in a movie theater since The Rise of Skywalker wheezed across the finish line in December 2019. That is the longest gap between theatrical Star Wars releases since the sixteen years between Return of the Jedi and The Phantom Menace. When The Mandalorian and Grogu opens on May 22, 2026, it will carry the weight of an entire franchise’s theatrical future on its tiny green shoulders.
Early box office tracking suggests those shoulders may not be broad enough.
The Numbers That Have the Industry Talking
Box Office Theory analyst Shawn Robbins is currently projecting a domestic opening weekend of $70 to $85 million for Jon Favreau’s big-screen continuation of the Disney+ series. If it lands at the low end of that window, it will open below Solo: A Star Wars Story‘s $84.4 million debut — making it the lowest-grossing opening weekend of any Disney-era Star Wars film, full stop.
Solo, for reference, is the movie Lucasfilm would very much like to never think about again. It finished at $392 million worldwide on a reported $275 million production budget and became the franchise’s first outright theatrical money-loser. Opening below Solo is the industry equivalent of limbo: how low can you go?
A separate data point, arguably more alarming, came from a recent Fandango survey of roughly 6,000 ticket buyers ranking their most-anticipated summer movies. The Mandalorian and Grogu didn’t make the top ten. Toy Story 5 topped the list. Mortal Kombat II made it. A Devil Wears Prada sequel made it. A Star Wars movie — the first one in seven years — did not.
That’s not doom. But it is a signal. And the signal is that the casual audience is not, at this moment, desperate to return to a galaxy far, far away.
Why This Isn’t Actually a Solo Situation
Before anyone writes the franchise’s obituary, there’s a wrinkle that makes all the difference: The Mandalorian and Groguis a much cheaper movie than any of its predecessors.
According to filings with the California Film Commission, the production budget sits around $166 million. That will climb as global post-production costs get folded in, but even at the high end, this is by some distance the cheapest live-action Star Wars film of the Disney era. Solo needed to clear around $500 million worldwide just to break even, and it couldn’t. Mandalorian and Grogu is working with a considerably friendlier math problem.
That matters, because “bomb” is a word that means different things at different budget levels. A $70 million opening on a $300 million movie is a catastrophe. A $70 million opening on a $166 million movie, with strong family legs through Memorial Day, the start of summer vacation, and a mostly empty family-film calendar until Toy Story 5 arrives in mid-June, is a pretty different conversation. It’s not a win. It is, possibly, a wash.
The Marketing Has Had a Rough Ride
None of this is helped by a promotional campaign that has, let’s say, struggled to settle on a personality.
The first trailer dropped in September 2025 and leaned heavily on Star Wars iconography — an AT-AT, a Hutt, a bit of old Cantina holochess, vibes — without communicating much about what the actual movie is about. Reception was mixed. Then came the Super Bowl LX spot in February, for which Disney reportedly paid around $10 million to air a 37-second Budweiser-pastiche commercial: Mando and Grogu in a carriage, tauntauns in the snow, Sam Elliott narrating about paths and bonds and purpose, zero actual footage from the movie.
Lucasfilm’s marketing team defended it as a homage to classic Big Game spots, designed to remind casual viewers that they love these characters on an emotional level rather than to sell them the plot of a specific film. Which is a very generous way to describe “spending eight figures to not really show anyone the movie.”
To the studio’s credit, they appeared to hear the feedback. A new, significantly more traditional trailer dropped days later — Sigourney Weaver’s Colonel Ward as the New Republic official sending Din and Grogu on their mission, a prolonged look at Pedro Pascal with his helmet off (a six-year first), and an actual sense of stakes and structure. It has racked up more than 11 million views in a month, slightly outpacing the first trailer’s lifetime total. Pedro Pascal and Sigourney Weaver presented two awards at the Oscars in March alongside a surprise Grogu appearance with Conan O’Brien. Empire magazine got the May cover. The course correction is real.
Whether it was enough, with only a few weeks to go, is the open question.
The Streaming Problem Star Wars Made for Itself
There is a deeper issue here, and it isn’t fixable by a better trailer.
From 2019 onward, Disney turned Star Wars into a streaming brand. The Mandalorian, The Book of Boba Fett, Obi-Wan Kenobi, Andor, Ahsoka, The Acolyte, Skeleton Crew — a torrent of content, released to couches, included with a subscription people were already paying for. Before Disney+, Star Wars was an event you waited years for. Now it’s a tab in your streaming menu.
That shift has a cost. The Mandalorian and Grogu started life as what would have been the fourth season of the show, was upgraded mid-stream into a theatrical release, and is now being asked to convince people to pay $20 (or $28 for IMAX) to see characters who, until recently, came free with their subscription. That is a difficult pitch, and it is the specific pitch Lucasfilm has to make.
Grogu Is Still a Weapon
The one thing working genuinely, unambiguously in the movie’s favor is Grogu.
He is, at this point, probably the single most recognizable new Disney character of the last decade. Kids love him. Parents know him. People who have never watched a full episode of The Mandalorian know him. That kind of cross-generational cachet — the thing that made Frozen, the thing that makes Toy Story — is real, and it is the strongest argument for this film having surprisingly durable legs once opening weekend is over. Memorial Day runway into early June, with only Project Hail Mary and limited indie counterprogramming in its path before Toy Story 5 on June 19, is a genuinely good slot for a family film to steadily accumulate money.
What Happens Next
The reason this is interesting isn’t just the movie itself. It’s Star Wars: Starfighter, scheduled for May 28, 2027 — a standalone film directed by Shawn Levy (fresh off Deadpool & Wolverine‘s $1.3 billion run), starring Ryan Gosling, with no streaming baggage and no continuity homework attached. That is Lucasfilm’s actual bet on theatrical Star Wars going forward. The Mandalorian and Grogu is the warmup act.
If Favreau’s film opens to $80 million and quietly legs it out to $500–600 million worldwide, Starfighter inherits a franchise in stable condition and gets the benefit of the doubt from audiences curious about the new direction.
If it opens soft and drops hard, every greenlight at Lucasfilm suddenly gets an extra round of meetings.
So, Is It Going to Bomb?
Probably not. The budget is too sensible, Grogu is too marketable, and the Memorial Day runway is too forgiving for this to become a John Carter-scale wipeout.
But the more honest read, based on what the tracking and the Fandango numbers are telling us right now, is this: The Mandalorian and Grogu looks less like a comeback than a measurement. It is Lucasfilm taking the temperature of its own audience after six years of streaming overexposure and finding that the temperature is… fine. Lukewarm. Interested, but not urgent.
For a franchise that was once the definition of urgency at the box office, that’s the real headline — bigger than any opening-weekend number will be.
