STAR WARS: THE MANDALORIAN AND GROGU (2026)

It’s fair to say that Star Wars has had a rocky road since Disney acquired it from George Lucas. They immediately set about making the long-awaited sequel trilogy to win back fans who thought the 1999–2005 prequels were a letdown, but they did so without a roadmap for where their new story was going. The result was the promising, if overfamiliar, “soft reboot” of The Force Awakens (2015), segueing into the creatively bold but divisive The Last Jedi (2017), which ultimately led to the appalling misfire of The Rise of Skywalker (2019) in trying to appease a fanbase with too much nostalgia.

The franchise retreated to the small screen with a variety of television prequels, still trying to recapture past glories. The best of the bunch was the first such outing on Disney+, The Mandalorian, which at least attempted to do something interesting with its Lone Wolf and Cub template. But even that show succumbed to the temptations of fan service, continually connecting itself back to things it had originally tried to avoid. Carving out a new path for Star Wars now seems nigh impossible, as it has become a playground for revisiting the past more than discovering a fresh future.

After seven years away from multiplexes, it was both alarming and slightly inevitable that Disney would bring Star Wars back with The Mandalorian and Grogu. It’s the only TV show that broke into the mainstream, mainly thanks to the “Baby Yoda” cuteness of its green alien, Grogu. Crucially, it also doesn’t require much awareness of Star Wars history and lore to grasp the core idea: a masked bounty hunter, Din Djarin (Pedro Pascal), goes about his business while protecting a Force-sensitive alien child from the evil Empire. After three seasons on TV, all you really need to know going into their movie is that Din has officially adopted Grogu as his son.

The problem now is one of expectations. Star Wars faceplanted with its sequel trilogy, which some claim is worse than the already-derided prequels, so the franchise feels irrevocably tarnished. Excitement for a new movie was minimal because audiences are flooded with genre entertainment. Star Wars movies were once cinematic events that pushed filmmaking technology into its next era, but now it’s just one click away from “content” on Disney+, delivered straight to your sofa. The Mandalorian and Grogu are “TV characters” in the minds of the audience, and because the budget of their show was so huge, the visual jump to the silver screen just isn’t as acute.

Still, we can have some fun, right? Is that all that matters?

The Mandalorian and Grogu is a two-hour version of the TV series — arguably four episodes strung together. The joins are sometimes clear, as it lacks a traditional three-act structure and instead seems to ebb and flow to the rhythm of a TV binge-watch. And since so much of the mystery surrounding Grogu was explained in the show, and Mando’s character mostly completed his hero’s journey there too, this film suffers from not having a clear reason to exist, except to make money and rehabilitate the Star Wars name with something inoffensive.

Still, it’s just another long adventure for Mando and Grogu, featuring better VFX and more expansive set-pieces that focus on those two characters. While the show overcame the issue of Mando being a voice behind a helmet and Grogu a gurgling puppet, it sometimes feels like they are missing a character or two along for the ride to flesh out the emotional beats. When that does occasionally happen, they tend to be CGI creatures that lack the human touch needed to ground these performances.

Mando accepts a job from the New Republic’s Commander Ward (Sigourney Weaver) to find an Imperial warlord called Coin, an endeavour that requires information held by the gangster Hutt Twins. However, they won’t give up their intel unless Mando rescues their nephew Rotta the Hutt (Jeremy Allen White) — Jabba’s son — who has been taken by a criminal syndicate and is forced to fight for his freedom, gladiator-style, on the planet Shakari.

The film hums along nicely and feels accessible even if you didn’t watch the Disney+ series, as the setup and characters play into archetypes we’ve seen many times across samurai or Western films. The cuteness of Grogu continues to delight, and Mando is a cool presence, even if he is arguably a little too stiff to shoulder a long-form narrative. It doesn’t help that Pedro Pascal likely continued to merely dub Mando’s voice for much of this, as there is only one sequence where his face is visible. Not that it matters exactly, but when you think back to the chemistry and interplay aboard the Millennium Falcon with Luke, Han, Leia, and Chewie, this spin-off doesn’t get close to that level of spark.

And that is a shame, as there is some enjoyment to be had in the spectacle of Mando effectively becoming the John Wick of the Star Wars universe — taking out an entire arena of monsters, a fortress palace of aliens, and whatever else life throws at him. Maybe it was easier to overlook his near-invulnerability on TV, with a week’s break between shorter adventures, but across a two-hour film it becomes almost ridiculous how easily Mando defeats swarms of enemies and even a giant Dragonsnake creature in a water-filled pit.

In terms of themes and depth, we certainly see some growth in Grogu during a sequence where the story follows his perspective as he tries to care for his mortally wounded father. Meanwhile, the situation with Rotta the Hutt touches on the expectations of children to follow in the footsteps of their parents — who, in Rotta’s case, was a murderous gangster feared across the galaxy. But for the most part, The Mandalorian and Grogu is time spent with those two characters zipping from planet to planet as their mission gathers unforeseen complications. Perhaps wisely, screenwriters Jon Favreau, Dave Filoni, and Noah Kloor don’t involve many other characters from the series — who could easily have appeared for a scene or two, or been more involved in general — as such cameos would prompt explanations that the narrative would prefer to spend focusing on its action.

Overall, The Mandalorian and Grogu isn’t a particularly good movie with a lot of re-watchability. It’s a condensed version of a TV season, armed with the budget to put its characters into bigger and more complex scenarios. But it’s rarely dull and the eponymous characters are charming. It’s just a shame the Star Wars brand is now stuck delivering better versions of the Ewok spin-off movies from the mid-1980s, when it was once such an undeniable event that shaped generations and pushed technological limits.

USA | 2026 | 132 MINUTES | 2.39:1 | COLOUR | ENGLISH

Cast & Crew

director: Jon Favreau.
writer: Jon Favreau, Dave Filoni & Noah Kloor (based on characters created by George Lucas).
starring: Pedro Pascal, Jeremy Allen White (voice), Brendan Wayne, Lateef Crowder, Jonny Coyne, Martin Scorsese (voice) & Sigourney Weaver.