The Mandalorian and Grogu has passed $150 million at the domestic box office, a milestone it reached this past weekend after nearly three weeks in theaters worldwide. The film also overtook a sci-fi franchise movie released a decade ago, but it is still being described as a commercial struggler.
That matters because Jon Favreau’s film is the first Star Wars movie in seven years, and the numbers around it have been muted from the start. It brought in just under $10 million domestically this weekend, a modest hold for a movie that had already posted the lowest opening weekend haul of any Star Wars installment of the Disney era.
Favreau directed the film, which serves as a spin-off of the Disney+ series he created, and the milestone gives Disney something firmer to point to than the opening frame did. Even so, the domestic total is only one part of the picture. The movie has more than $150 million in the United States, but it has not yet closed the gap left by its reported $165 million production budget, the roughly $100 million in marketing costs that are widely attributed to it, or the estimated $500 million worldwide break-even point.
That is where the friction sits. The Mandalorian and Grogu is now ahead of a decade-old sci-fi franchise title at home, but it still trails Solo: A Star Wars Story, which made more than $210 million in the United States in 2018. Crossing a domestic marker is real progress; changing the commercial story is a much harder task. The next question is not whether the movie can claim a box-office milestone, but how far it can climb before the run is measured against the sum it needs worldwide.
