Everything Is Proceeding Exactly as Lucasfilm Has Foreseen

The hardest thing for a major franchise to admit is that it has run out of road, and the surest sign that it has is when the people running it start talking like everything is fine. The Mandalorian and Grogu has been in theaters for two weekends now, and the numbers are not catastrophic, they are fine. For the first theatrical Star Wars film in seven years, fine is the most damning verdict available.

Start with what actually happened, because the box office discourse around this one has been a mess of bad math and worse faith. The film opened to roughly $98 million across the four-day Memorial Day holiday, about $81 million for the three days, against a reported net budget of $165 million. That is a series low for a theatrical Star Wars release, narrowly undercutting 2018's Solo, though Solo carried a budget closer to $275 million and so lost real money in a way this film probably will not. Add the international take and the global start lands around $165 million, which means the production budget is more or less covered on paper before you factor in the parts of the ledger nobody outside Burbank can see. This is the thing worth being upfront about: Hollywood accounting is built to be inscrutable, and Disney has every incentive to keep the actual breakeven number fuzzy. Nobody on the internet, myself included, can tell you with certainty what this film needed to earn to count as a win, especially once you fold in Disney+ value, the new Millennium Falcon: Smugglers Run attraction tie-in, the Fortnite integration, and merchandise. Anyone claiming otherwise is selling something.

What can be measured is the second weekend, and that is where the picture gets uncomfortable. The film fell to around $25 million, a drop of roughly 69 percent. For a frame of reference, the industry standard for a healthy hold is closer to 50 percent, and you would expect a family title with strong word of mouth to hold even better, since the second weekend is when the people who skipped the crowds finally show up. Instead it dropped harder than Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, and we buried that one as proof a franchise was dead. The comparison that should keep Lucasfilm up at night is Backrooms, the $10 million analog-horror feature directed by 20-year-old Kane Parsons, grown out of a YouTube and Steam meme that you cannot avoid if you have ever been on either of those sites. It opened within a hair of a Star Wars movie. The full weight of the most valuable brand in genre filmmaking, neck and neck with a creepypasta someone made for the price of a single Mandalorian establishing shot.

To be clear, the movie itself is not the problem, or at least not the whole problem. It works well enough. The trouble is that at no point does it feel like a film that needed to exist in a theater. Nothing here demanded IMAX, demanded a ticket, or even demanded that you leave the house. It plays like a two-hour episode of the show, and there is very little in it that would not have worked just as well on Disney+ at an identical budget. That is the unforced error, and Disney keeps making it. The Marvels is the cautionary tale nobody at Lucasfilm seems to have studied: a theatrical release that functioned as homework for several streaming shows, and which cratered even though WandaVision and Ms. Marvel had been well received on their own terms. The lesson was never that the shows were bad, it was that you cannot charge people theater money for a continuation of something they watched at home, especially when the story they watched at home already had an ending.

That last point is the one that matters most here. The Mandalorian season three was mixed, the warmth of the first season long since complicated by The Book of Boba Fett and the broader fatigue that set in somewhere around the time the franchise started eating itself. By the time that season closed, it played like a goodbye. Watching it, you could reasonably conclude these characters had said what they had to say, and make peace with never seeing them again. A film that exists to reopen a door the audience had already accepted was shut is fighting uphill before a frame of footage is shot. It is worth noting that Dave Filoni literally turns up in the third act in a literal save-the-day capacity, which, whatever you think of the previous regime, is at least a different flavor of problem than the ones The Rise of Skywalker gave us.

Here is the real issue, the one the numbers only gesture at. Filoni has been giving interviews about how everything is proceeding exactly as he foresaw, which is a fun line to borrow from the Emperor right up until you remember that "everything is proceeding as I have foreseen" is precisely what you say when you do not want people to notice that things are not. Of course, it's also worth noting that after saying this the Emperor got thrown down an elevator shaft. It is trust-the-process talk, and Lucasfilm has not done anything lately to earn the trust or clarify the process. The release slate ahead is barren. There are films circling from Shawn Levy, James Mangold, and Taika Waititi, and any of them could be good. The honest problem is that there is no reason to be invested in the longevity of this franchise as a franchise right now because there is no single project on the horizon that makes you think, all right, at least that is coming and it will make the rest cohere. When the first move you make after a seven-year theatrical absence is an interquel that amounts to filling in what happened after one season of television and before what may potentially be a movie some day, you are telling everyone watching that you do not yet know what you actually want to do.

So where does Star Wars go from here? The smart money says it limps toward D23 and waits to see whether Lucasfilm shows up with something, anything, that reframes the next few years as a plan rather than a holding pattern. Nobody is asking for universe-ending stakes in every release. The ask is much smaller than that. It is simply for a reason to care about what comes next, and a film that exists mostly to remind you these characters are still bankable is not it. The Mandalorian and Grogu did not fail. It just quietly confirmed that fine is the ceiling now, and for the galaxy that once opened to a quarter-billion dollars in a single weekend, fine should feel a lot more alarming than a flop would have.