They say that only a Sith deals in absolutes, which might help explain what’s going on with The Mandalorian And Grogu, a motion picture that blurs the line between movie and TV show in an unprecedented way. While there are plenty of shows based on movies or movies based on shows, audiences have never truly encountered something as recursive as The Mandalorian And Grogu, a film based on a TV series based on a franchise of movies. The Mandalorian, the first live-action Star Wars series, premiered on Disney+ in 2019. Set after the events of Return Of The Jedi but before the sequel trilogy, it started as a relatively standalone spin-off show, but over the course of three seasons (and a few random episodes of another show, The Book Of Boba Fett), more connective tissue to the films and especially the various animated Star Wars series emerged. As Mando and the child formerly known as Baby Yoda make the leap to the big screen, they’re also leaping into unprecedented territory.
“Wait! What about Star Trek?” you might ask. It’s a reasonable thought—there are franchises that regularly jump between the big and small screens. Plenty of superheroes, like Batman, Superman, and Spider-Man, have starred in both TV shows and movies. The difference between what’s happening with Star Wars and them is that the Star Wars franchise began as a film. The superheroes originated as comic book characters, and their films and movies are various adaptations that are typically not canonically connected. You can track Batman from the Adam West days to Tim Burton to Batman: The Animated Series to The Dark Knight, but that TV-to-film back-and-forth isn’t a continuous story, nor is it one that began theatrically. Star Trek does have an ongoing connected narrative, though as a franchise that began on TV, it’s understood that the films—whether they feature the Original Series or Next Generation casts—are special, super-sized adventures of something that began on the small screen.
Even digging deeper into multi-platform franchises reveals that there still isn’t a direct comparison with The Mandalorian And Grogu. Plenty of film series have spin-off TV shows that take place between the events of the movies. How To Train Your Dragon has Dragons: Riders Of Berk. Jurassic Park has Camp Cretaceous. For non-animated examples, see The Purge and Monarch: Legacy Of Monsters. These shows are akin to bonus content; they fill in the gaps between movies rather than feature load-bearing narratives of their own. You can make the case that, when it first aired, The Mandalorian was this type of show, offering up a tale of a cool bounty hunter in an otherwise unexplored gap of the Star Wars timeline. But the series is no longer extra credit; in addition to gradually adding important characters from the films (including Luke Skywalker), The Mandalorian‘s story is continuing in the first Star Wars movie in close to seven years.
More specifically, a theatrical movie. Sure, pedants may note that the Lilo & Stitch spin-off TV series ended with a movie, but Leroy & Stitch was a straight-to-video release, not something that Disney planned an entire financial quarter around. The Stargate movie spawned a whole suite of TV spin-offs, and Stargate SG-1 had spin-off movies of its own. But they were also straight-to-DVD, and it’s not like Stargate was ever a fraction as popular as Star Wars. No other TV spin-off has enjoyed this rise in stature and importance—to say nothing of the financial pressure that comes along with it.
Tracking for The Mandalorian And Grogu suggests that the movie will open to around $80 million. That would be a pretty low first weekend for a Star Wars movie—all of the prior Disney Star Wars films opened to well over $100 million except for Solo, and that film’s $84 million first weekend was considered a huge disappointment. (The Mandalorian And Grogu‘s budget is admittedly much lower than Solo‘s.) And yet, an $80 million opening weekend would make The Mandalorian And Grogu one of the highest-grossing movies based on a TV show of all time, not adjusted for inflation. The Simpsons Movie made $74 million on its opening weekend in 2007, while J.J. Abrams’ first Star Trek took in $75 million two years later. Whether The Mandalorian And Grogu becomes a huge hit or an underwhelming flop partly depends on classification. Is it a Star Wars movie, or a TV movie?
It’s perhaps ominous that the movie that is the closest comparison to The Mandalorian And Grogu was a box office bomb. 2023’s The Marvels is a sequel to Captain Marvel, the Brie Larson-led 2019 film, but it is also a sequel to two Disney+ shows, as characters from both WandaVision and Ms. Marvel (Teyonah Parris’ Monica Rambeau and Iman Vellani’s Kamala Khan, respectively) rounded out the three-hander. And even though Captain Marvel made more than $1 billion in theaters, The Marvels made just over $200 million worldwide. There are a lot of factors that could account for the flop; the fact that two-thirds of the lead characters originated in streaming TV shows that general audiences might not have watched probably didn’t help. Still, even The Marvels had a movie star reprising her role as a popular movie character right on the poster. The equivalent for The Mandalorian might be if this was a movie about Han Solo that also featured Mando and Grogu. Instead, The Mandalorian And Grogu is selling itself purely on Star Wars iconography and two characters who originated in a streaming TV series.
Star Wars itself has blurred the lines between TV and film before, though never to this extent. General Grievous made his debut in Genndy Tartakovsky’s Clone Wars series, the finale of which directly leads into the opening of Revenge Of The Sith. Yet for general audiences, Episode III wasn’t a sequel to this Cartoon Network series; it was a sequel to Episode II. Perhaps most crucially, Clone Wars aired during an era when Star Wars ruled the box office. The prequels were theatrical events and the spin-off shows were just that, spin-offs. The Mandalorian And Grogu comes seven years after The Rise Of Skywalker more or less poisoned the theatrical well for Star Wars. The IP has fundamentally existed as a TV franchise for most of this decade, with shows like The Mandalorian, Ahsoka, Rebels, The Bad Batch, Obi-Wan, Skeleton Crew, and Andor carrying the Star Wars name forward with varying degrees of success.
Even before its premiere, that’s the most unique thing about The Mandalorian And Grogu. Where other movies based on TV shows are making a big leap to the big screen, a gambit to conquer a new medium, The Mandalorian And Grogu is trying to reclaim cinemas after its IP essentially ceded the territory. We haven’t ever seen an ongoing franchise jump so thoroughly from theaters to TV and then attempt to leap back up. Mando will be the first, and depending on how he fares, maybe the last—good thing he’s got that jetpack.
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