This week, the new Star Wars movie – the first live action film since 2019’s commercially successful but largely ridiculed Rise of Skywalker – will come out in cinemas. Clunkily entitled The Mandalorian and Grogu, it is a big-screen spin-off of the once-successful and now largely passé Mandalorian series. A lot is riding on its success, and Lucasfilm, now controlled by Dave Filoni, will be very relieved if it is a hit.
When Disney paid the big bucks for Lucasfilm, they were not thinking about moral ambiguity or wit
Unfortunately, audiences don’t seem especially interested. Advance word on it has been mediocre for some time now – the words “feature-length television movie” have been used more than once – and the box office prediction for its opening weekend is currently somewhere between £50 and 60 million. Which might sound like a big hit, but given that The Rise of Skywalker made nearly £70 million on its opening day nearly seven years ago, this is an unimpressive figure, which may of course decline further if word of mouth is brutally negative.
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Brendan O’Neill
