Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu: Thoughts on the Box Office

For many decades the Star Wars franchise was king of the blockbusters. Not only did the original 1977 Star Wars, by bringing the model the James Bond franchise had already established years earlier to slow-learning Hollywood, do much to redefine the Hollywood blockbuster (above all, through its assimilation of the principles of the modern action film, and the popularization of the franchised and merchandised action-packed sci-fi spectacle). It was also the case that this franchise itself was such a strong performer that every one of the original film's sequels and prequels was an event that could be expected to, and almost always did, top the year's box office chart. So did it go with Episodes V and VI and I (in 1980, 1983 and 1999, respectively). With Episode II, Attack of the Clones, there was something of an upset, the first Sam Raimi-helmed Spider-Man taking the crown that year, but that was really an outlier, while at any rate Star Wars was still #2 that year (2002), and Episodes III, VII and VIII, and even the tie-in Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, all the chart-toppers of their years afterward (2005, 2015, 2017 and 2016, respectively), one reason why the folks at Disney had fantasies of turning the Star Wars universe into another Marvel Cinematic Universe machine for cranking out billion-dollar hits.

Of course, all that came to an end with the unfortunate prequel 2018 release Solo. In the wake of that flop Disney shelved its bigger plans, and completed only one more Star Wars film, the last of the new trilogy begun with Episode VII in 2015, which brought in another billion-dollar gross but looked far from being the king of a year dominated by the climax to another cycle about which people seemed far more excited, the Marvel Cinematic Universe's culmination in Phase Three's finale, Avengers: Endgame (a nearly three-billion dollar hit that claimed the all-time box office champion crown!), and even such other hits as the live-action adaptation of The Lion King--just "another franchise" among many in a box office where what had originally been novel about the Star Wars series had since become commonplace. As if that were not enough, the shock to everything Hollywood did by the pandemic (and one might add, the strikes of 2023) compounded the shock of the aforementioned box office reversals, producing a long dry spell in which "actually existing" new Star Wars stories were confined to small screen streaming series' (where, if the economics are comparatively opaque, one would presume them to have flourished given how prolific Disney's investment in them has been), until, following the announcement of many Star Wars projects that just never panned out (new Star Wars movies by Rian Johnson and Taika Waititi and Patty Jenkins and James Mangold, the Suits apparently asking "Who's hot right now?" and dropping their projects when they ceased to be hot, in the main because of their can't-work-within-someone-else's-franchise-because-I-am-an-arteest! auteur pretensions, inability to understand the material with which they are to work, and general stupidity, as we saw with The Last Jedi, Thor 4, Wonder Woman: 1984 and Indiana Jones 5), we finally got Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu in May 2026.

Did the new movie mark the return of Star Wars to the top of the box office? Alas, no. Indeed, it didn't even get near the billion-dollar mark, its run apparently sputtering out with just a third that sum banked, less than what Solo made back in 2018 even before we adjust for inflation--and all that, I might add, in a patch of the summer where the competition was not too strong. (It certainly wasn't as if Masters of the Universe was sucking the air out of the box office with roaring ticket sales!) Still, if one cannot call Mandalorian and Grogu a sensational performer, and indeed would be justified in regarding it as a disappointment showing how far Star Wars has fallen as a commercial force, one may be mistaken in calling it a money-loser. After all, knowing that Star Wars is just "another franchise," and at that one a half century old and very intensively (sometimes erratically) mined in recent years, its backers do not seem to have counted on its being a box office champion. Accordingly the budget, if far from small, indeed fairly respectable for a major summer release ($165 million!), was still more modest than those of many of its predecessors--a smaller production released with lower expectations that even with the far from stellar gross may well see the movie at least break even when the post-theatrical revenue is taken into account (coming on top of the $170 million or so likely to have been netted theatrically, something north of $300 million plausible, quite enough to cover not just the cost of the production but the marketing/distribution costs as well, and plausibly even turn a profit). Moreover, this particular movie had a stronger claim than most films to being judged by more than its box office given its role in shoring up the TV empire of which it is a tie-in, the back catalog value of one of the biggest franchises in history (in this case, not to be trivialized), and the merchandising value of all things related to it (which is, again, a very big deal in Star Wars' case). The result is that if the makers of Mandalorian and Grogu may reasonably have hoped for more than they got in the way of ticket sales not only may they be better than dissatisfied with the result, but, as they clearly hope that Shawn Levy, who unlike so many of the arteests to whom Disney turned in the past shown that he knows how to thrill the fan base of a creaking franchise, will score again the way he did in 2024 when Star Wars: Starfighter hits theaters a year after Mandalorian did, Memorial Day weekend 2027--and if all concerned are very, very lucky, helping establish a tradition of Memorial Day Star Wars movies, just as the Marvel Cinematic Universe did of new Marvel superhero movies on the opening weekend in May for so many years.