The Mandalorian and Grogu landed in theaters this weekend, and the reviews aren’t bad, exactly. They’re middling — and on the lower end of middling at that. Sitting at 61% on Rotten Tomatoes and 55 on Metacritic as of this writing, the first big-screen Star Wars movie in nearly seven years is being called “watchable,” “a placeholder,” “content, not cinema,” and — most tellingly — “better than The Rise of Skywalker.”
Pay attention to that last one, because it’s doing something interesting.
For the entire seven-year stretch between J.J. Abrams’ 2019 trilogy-capper and Jon Favreau’s adventure movie, The Rise of Skywalker sat in the public consciousness as the lowest point of the Disney era of Star Wars — the franchise’s punching bag, the chaotic course-correction nobody wanted, the movie that ended a generation-defining saga with a fizzling shrug. It’s still the lowest-rated live-action Star Wars movie on Rotten Tomatoes (51%). It still has its detractors. But — and you can feel this happening in real time — it’s starting to be reframed.
Critics are using it as a baseline. Fans on TikTok are doing “TROS wasn’t that bad” reaction videos. The “actually, the Reylo scene is iconic” discourse is back. Reddit threads titled “okay but rewatching Rise of Skywalker…” are quietly accumulating likes. And the “they fly now?” exchange — once the canonical example of TROS at its worst — has, through some combination of meme energy and genuine nostalgia, become a quotable beat that even the movie’s harshest critics now invoke fondly.
If you’ve been a Star Wars fan for more than 20 years, you know exactly what this is.
It’s the cycle.
The prequel trilogy is the canonical case study. From 1999 through roughly 2015, The Phantom Menace was the universal symbol of franchise disappointment, Jar Jar Binks was a punchline, and any serious Star Wars fan knew that the prequels were a Lucas-era betrayal of the original trilogy’s grace. Audience scores on Rotten Tomatoes plummeted to 64% on Revenge of the Sith over the course of 32 million votes cast within a single month in 2010 — a deliberate downward reassessment of the films by the people who’d grown up with them. The consensus was iron-clad: prequels bad, originals good.
Then The Force Awakens happened. Then The Last Jedi happened. Then the prequel kids grew up and inherited the franchise’s discourse.
And now? The Phantom Menace was the most-streamed Star Wars title of 2025, outpacing The Empire Strikes Back. All three prequels are in the franchise’s top six most-streamed titles. NPR is running pieces about audiences “returning to the prequels 20 years later to reevaluate everything about them.” The same fans who threw popcorn at Attack of the Clones in 2002 are now wearing “I love Jar Jar” T-shirts unironically.
It’s not just the films getting better with time. It’s the same fans, on the same internet, changing their minds about the same movies.
Rian Johnson — the director of The Last Jedi, the man who replaced Lucas as the figure most despised by a certain segment of Star Wars fandom — said the quiet part out loud last summer. In a July 2025 Rolling Stone interview, Johnson admitted that he had personally hated the prequels in his 20s, that he had been part of the online vanguard mocking them, and that watching the same dynamic play out around his own film had given him a kind of accidental empathy.
“Now the prequels are embraced,” Johnson observed, per Rolling Stone. “I’m not saying that as a facile ‘Oh, things will flip around in 20 years.’ It’s more that this push and pull, and this hatred to stuff that seems new, this is all part of being a Star Wars fan.”
Johnson, who has every reason to be bitter about the discourse around The Last Jedi, was generous about Abrams’ follow-up. He told Rolling Stone that Abrams “did the same thing with the third that I did with the second” — pushed the story in ways that felt compelling for that filmmaker at that moment. Which, twelve years after The Force Awakens started this whole sequel-era argument, is the kind of grace note that only time and distance produce.
Here’s what’s worth noticing about the cycle, though: it’s accelerating.
The prequel reassessment took about 15 years to fully arrive. The TROS reassessment is starting to bubble up after six. There are a few reasons for that, all of them structural. The franchise has been almost entirely off the big screen since 2019, which gives every preceding film a kind of breathing room. The Disney+ shows — The Mandalorian, Andor, Ahsoka, and yes, even The Acolyte — have rewritten what Star Wars feels like on a week-to-week basis, which inevitably reframes how the older films look in retrospect. And the kids who saw TROS in theaters at age ten are now sixteen, with their own discourse, their own letterboxd reviews, and their own willingness to defend the movies they grew up with against the older fans who told them they were wrong to love them.
(Sound familiar? That’s the prequel cycle, beat for beat.)
There’s also the Mandalorian and Grogu effect specifically. Watching a Star Wars movie that’s pleasant and forgettable and feels like a glorified episode of television has a way of making The Rise of Skywalker — for all its flaws — feel ambitious by comparison. TROS was, whatever else it was, swinging. Palpatine returning, sister Skywalker, Reylo kiss, planet-destroying Sith fleet, “they fly now,” the whole baroque mess. It tried to land a trilogy. It tried to mean something. The fact that it failed in some big, public ways is now becoming, in the reassessment phase, evidence that it cared.
This isn’t an argument that The Rise of Skywalker is a good movie. It’s an argument that the discourse around it is about to change, because the discourse around every Star Wars film eventually changes, because the only constant in this fandom is that the next thing you make will be considered the bad one, and the thing you made before will quietly turn into a classic.
If you want to know what the cycle looks like in its purest form, listen to the people walking out of The Mandalorian and Grogu this weekend. They’re not coming out saying it’s the worst Star Wars movie they’ve ever seen. They’re coming out saying it’s worse than they hoped — and saying things like, well, at least Rey’s parentage made some kind of sense.
The reappraisal isn’t coming. It’s already started.
