[COLUMN] Is The Mandalorian and Grogu Truly the Way? | by Darren Mooney (Patreon)

Earlier this week, it was announced that Lucasfilm was working on a new Star Wars movie, under the title The Mandalorian and Grogu. As the title implies, this would be a theatrical spin-off focusing on the two lead characters from The Mandalorian. It will be produced by Kathleen Kennedy, alongside Dave Filoni and Jon Favreau. The movie will enter production this year, and Favreau would also direct. It would bring the Disney+ streaming Star Wars shows to the big screen.

This is interesting. The press release goes out of its way to mention that Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy, James Mangold and Dave Filoni are also working on theatrical Star Wars projects. However, it also demonstrates how hard it has been to bring a Star Wars project to cinemas in the wake of The Rise of Skywalker. Patty Jenkins, Kevin Feige, Taika Waititi, David Benioff and Dan Weiss, and Damon Lindelof have all been attached to Star Wars films over the past few years, with little traction.

As with the recent news about the development of a feature film directed by Obaid-Chinoy and focused on Rey (Daisy Ridley) in the wake of The Rise of Skywalker, this announcement suggests that Disney and Lucasfilm are serious about bringing the Star Wars franchise back to the big screen. In fact, there’s a sense in which these two projects work in parallel, functioning as separate and distinct sequels to two unique branches of the Star Wars canon: the films and the streaming shows.

Indeed, The Mandalorian and Grogu seems like a modest test run for a long-rumored Lucasfilm project, a loose adaptation of Timothy Zahn’s Heir to the Empire that would serve as a gigantic crossover of the various streaming shows, including The Mandalorian, The Book of Boba Fett and Ahsoka. In fact, Ahsoka seemed to push strongly in that direction by introducing the character of Grand Admiral Thrawn (Lars Mikkelsen) into live action continuity.

On one level, this makes sense. Lucasfilm has had trouble with their films, including games of musical chairs involving directors on Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, Solo: A Star Wars Story and The Rise of Skywalker. However, their streaming output has been more consistent. There were high-profile troubles on Obi-Wan Kenobi, but it seems Jon Favreau has kept The Mandalorian on an even keel, with most of the controversy revolving around how much time star Pedro Pascal spends on set.

The streaming shows have undoubtedly been helped by being insulated from the damage that Solo and The Rise of Skywalker did to the Star Wars theatrical brand. Solo was a deeply troubled production and a box office disappointment. The Rise of Skywalker received both the harshest critical reviews and the lowest CinemaScore of any live action Star Wars film. In contrast, The Mandalorian was warmly received by critics and fans, offering something of a reset to the franchise’s brand.

The Mandalorian was also an unqualified success for Disney+. It was the streaming service’s flagship show, its first original series. It undoubtedly drove subscriptions to the young service, which remains perhaps the only streaming service run by a traditional studio that could compete with Netflix, Amazon and Apple. Within a month of its premiere, The Mandalorian became the most in-demand show on the planet. These are good reasons to bet on The Mandalorian as the future of Star Wars.

However, there are also reasons to be cautious. Most obviously, it is hard to move from television to cinema, particularly within the framework and expectations of blockbuster moviemaking. The Star Trek franchise is perhaps the most obvious point of comparison, with the casts of both the original Star Trek and The Next Generation making the leap. However, Star Trek is not Star Wars. Paramount recently learned the folly of expecting Star Trek movies to perform like modern blockbusters.

Other shows attempted to make the leap. The X-Files was at the peak of its popularity when Fox took a gamble on Fight the Future, a between seasons blockbuster focusing on Mulder (David Duchovny) and Scully (Gillian Anderson). Creator Chris Carter made no secret of his ambitions to transition the series into a film franchise. Instead, the show ran for four more seasons and waited over a decade to release a low-budget cinematic sequel that got steamrolled by The Dark Knight.

There are exceptions. However many of these exist independent of the source material, as continuity-free reboots like The Brady Bunch, Charlie’s Angels, The Equalizer, The Fugitive or the Mission: Impossible franchise. Comedy shows that are light on continuity have proven reasonably reliable at attracting large theatrical audiences, as demonstrated by The Simpsons Movie, South Park: Bigger, Long and Uncut or The Naked Gun. But even these don’t earn like a Star Wars film needs to.

The Mandalorian is going to come with a lot of continuity. Although the show’s first season was a largely episodic adventure serial, the mythology of these streaming shows has become increasingly dense and interconnected. In order to understand what had happened to the title character (Pascal) between the second and third seasons of The Mandalorian, the viewer had to watch The Book of Boba Fett. On tuning into the third season premiere, many Mandalorian fans were confused.

This gets into a persistent issue with the streaming era. At a certain point, these hours of “content soup” start to feel like homework. While they provide “fan service methadone” for hardcore adherents, they become a barrier to entry for casual fans. Disney’s closest point of comparison to The Mandalorian and Grogu might be The Marvels, a theatrical film that served as a sequel to two streaming shows: WandaVision and Ms. Marvel. It became the lowest-grossing Marvel movie.

Of course, there may be differences. Streaming viewership is frustratingly opaque, making it hard to accurately gauge the performance of individual shows. While WandaVision seems to have been one of Disney’s more successful streaming shows, it seems like Ms. Marvel was one of the weaker performers. However, the third season of The Mandalorian has also seen a steep decline from previous years, with both its premiere and finale viewership reportedly down significantly.

There may be a broader issue that is even harder to quantify. Viewers obviously pay a subscription to watch movies and shows on Disney+, but there is a tendency to think of individual shows and movies on the service as “free.” Sitting down to watch an episode of The Mandalorian on the couch doesn’t entail the same immediate and tangible cost as travelling to a theatre and exchanging money for a ticket to see a feature film, or even going to a store and handing over cash for a disc.

By putting its premiere brands like Marvel and Star Wars on streaming, there is a very real risk that Disney has conditioned audiences to think of these franchises as something that they get for free. It is obviously impossible to prove this assertion, but it seems undeniable that sending Pixar movies directly to streaming made it harder to convince audiences to pay to see Lightyear or Elemental. To quote a meme: “We have The Mandalorian and Grogu at home.”

Disney itself has acknowledged the negative impact of streaming on theatrical performance. Studios (including Disney) have spent years trying to shrink the theatrical window, the gap between a movie’s release in cinemas and its arrival on streaming. Without a long wait before it hits streaming, there’s less appreciable urgency to see movies like The Marvels in theatres. Early last year, Disney signaled that they would be trying to extend that window to protect theatrical box office.

There’s a lot counting against The Mandalorian and Grogu. It is difficult for television shows to transition into film franchises while retaining their continuity, and even those that succeed don’t perform like Star Wars movies need to. The audiences for these streaming shows seem to be declining, as their continuity locks out casual viewers. It is also quite tough to convince audiences to pay for something that they perceive as having received for “free” in the past.

Adding up these risks, The Mandalorian and Grogu no longer seems like such a safe bet for Lucasfilm, even without the tarnish that Solo and The Rise of Skywalker left on the theatrical Star Wars brand. This may explain why Disney is hedging its bets with a direct sequel to The Rise of Skywalker, even though that is inevitably caught up in the gravity of the least well-regarded live action Star Wars film. It’s easy to understand why Lucasfilm has had trouble relaunching the Star Wars film franchise.

Ironically, the safest option might be to take the biggest risk, to launch a Star Wars film franchise completely disconnected from the tangled continuity of the streaming shows or the mess left by Solo and The Rise of Skywalker. Hire good filmmakers, give them creative freedom, and let them make a Star Wars movie that can be sold on its own merits without unnecessary baggage. Of course, that’s a choice that’s harder to justify than throwing some familiar iconography in front of the camera.

Still, this is all somewhat academic at this point. Lucasfilm have decided that they need to get some Star Wars content back in movie theatres sooner rather than later, and with no other options gaining traction, they’ve decided that this is the way.