The Mandalorian and Grogu
Disney
The Mandalorian and Grogu ended up being a crowd-pleaser, with an 87% Rotten Tomatoes audience score that was an all-time high for the Disney Star Wars era. Its box office? That’s another story.
The Mandalorian and Grogu will set another record there, but a very, very bad one. After the film’s third weekend of release, it is now in sixth place at the domestic box office, with severe week-over-week drops. It’s now losing to Scary Movie, Masters of the Universe, Backrooms, Obsession and The Amazing Digital Circus. It made $9.9 million, and with a 60% drop from the second week, that will continue to go lower and lower until it hits streaming.
The end result of that is The Mandalorian and Grogu will almost certainly be the lowest-grossing Star Wars movie ever, currently a full $100 million below Solo, which was widely considered a flop that helped ice Disney’s Star Wars film projects for years. Here is the grand list of Star Wars movie box office hauls, and keep in mind, the older ones are not adjusted for inflation:
- Episode VII: The Force Awakens – $2 billion
- Episode VIII: The Last Jedi – $1.3 billion
- Episode IX: The Rise of Skywalker – $1.06 billion
- Rogue One – $1.05 billion
- Episode I: The Phantom Menace – $1.04 billion
- Episode III: Revenge of the Sith – $902 million
- Episode IV: A New Hope – $775 million
- Episode II: Attack of the Clones – $656 million
- Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back – $549 milloin
- Episode VI: Return of the Jedi – $482 million
- Solo – $393 million
- The Mandalorian and Grogu (currently) – $294 million
And if you do add in inflation (which has certainly been on the rise), Solo would actually have $521 million. One bright spot for The Mandalorian and Grogu is that its budget was $165 million, but with marketing and other costs, it’s unclear how much of a profit it might turn, if any. Regardless, Disney doesn’t want its Star Wars projects merely skating by. Hopping across the comparison column, The Mandalorian and Grogu is currently performing worse than every MCU movie besides The Incredible Hulk ($264 million) and The Marvels ($206 million).
What are at least supposed to be Disney’s next two Star Wars projects are perhaps even bigger risks. Next year will give us Star Wars: Starfighter, starring Ryan Gosling, and then in the works, supposedly, is James Mangold’s Dawn of the Jedi. While it may be creatively important to break out of the Skywalker era, neither of those films will star and may not even feature any big known Star Wars characters. At least The Mandalorian and Grogu has some amount of previous cultural impact behind it.
Disney’s Star Wars plans remain bogged down in muck, and with so little apparently on the way, it’s unclear what may be able to turn this around.
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