Disney’s next Star Wars movie is arriving with a modest critical response and a big question hanging over it: whether the franchise can still feel like an event after 14 years of Disney ownership and a long run on streaming. The Mandalorian and Grogu had a Rotten Tomatoes rating of 61% at the time of writing, a far cry from the kind of reception that once greeted the brand’s biggest theatrical releases.
Critics called the film charming, brisk and visually polished, but also thin, formulaic and weirdly televisual. One description cut to the heart of the problem: it felt less like a grand restoration of Star Wars on the big screen than three Disney+ episodes stitched together. Jon Favreau’s film leans on callbacks to villains from TV episodes, while Mando keeps doing what the character does best — processing hapless stormtroopers into white-armoured landfill more efficiently than ever. Grogu remains precision-engineered for adorability, which is part of the appeal and part of the commercial calculation.
That calculation has already paid off for Disney. When it bought Lucasfilm for roughly $4bn in 2012, the company inherited a franchise that still had box-office firepower. The Force Awakens made more than $2bn worldwide in 2015, Rogue One topped more than $1bn worldwide in 2016, and The Last Jedi cleared more than $1.3bn in 2017. Even The Rise of Skywalker, widely disliked by most of the fandom, still earned Disney more than $1bn in 2019.
Then Disney+ changed the shape of the galaxy. Andor, The Book of Boba Fett, Obi-Wan Kenobi, Ahsoka and The Mandalorian all landed on the service, making streaming a major delivery system for Star Wars stories. That shift kept the brand visible, but it also crowded the field. Instead of a handful of marquee films carrying the mythology forward, the franchise became a steady stream of returns to familiar names, eras and faces.
The new movie sits right in that middle zone, between the fall of the Galactic Empire and the rise of the First Order, with a hero who has no genetic connection to Boba Fett and a beloved child figure who is not the son of Yoda and Yaddle. Those details matter because they show how much of modern Star Wars now depends on association rather than revelation. The story keeps reaching back to reassure viewers that they know this universe, even when the material itself is new.
That is the tension Disney now has to live with. Star Wars movies once had the power to reset the conversation on their own. Now the franchise is split between a cinema audience that expects a bigger lift and a streaming audience trained to accept smaller, serialised pieces. The Mandalorian and Grogu does not solve that problem. It makes it plain.
