Mark the date, because it has been a while: for the first time since December 2019, there is a new Star Wars movie in theaters. “The Mandalorian and Grogu” opens nationwide today after pulling in $12 million from last night’s previews, and the whole entertainment industry is watching this Memorial Day weekend like a pod race, because the stakes go well beyond one film. Seven years is the longest theatrical drought in the franchise’s modern history, and Lucasfilm chose to end it not with a saga film but with a TV graduation ceremony.
Jon Favreau directs, the first time the man who built this corner of the galaxy on Disney+ has taken it to the big screen himself, with Din Djarin (Pedro Pascal) and his small green co-star making the jump from your living room to a forty-foot screen. The supporting cast has its own headline: Sigourney Weaver joins the galaxy far, far away as a character named Ward, which means the upfront-week sight of Weaver introducing Star Wars content suddenly makes a lot more corporate sense.
Critics watched a two-hour episode of television with a blockbuster budget, and they said so.”
Now for the number hanging over opening day. Reviews landed this week at 64% on the Tomatometer, and there is no way to spin that inside the franchise’s history: it is the second-lowest critic score of the entire Disney era, ahead of only “The Rise of Skywalker” at 51%. The consensus forming across the major outlets praises the action, the visual craft, and the central duo’s chemistry while dinging the film for a thin narrative and a heavy reliance on fan service. In other words, critics watched a two-hour episode of television with a blockbuster budget, and they said so.
Here is the thing about that reading, though. A two-hour episode of television with a blockbuster budget is precisely what a large portion of this fanbase ordered. The show became a phenomenon on the strength of lived-in bounty-hunter adventures, a mostly silent lead, and a puppet with merchandising superpowers, not on labyrinthine lore. If the film delivers that formula with theatrical scale, the 64% may end up mattering less than any Star Wars critic score in years. This is the franchise’s most four-quadrant-friendly property, and four-quadrant audiences do not read the Tomatometer on their way to a holiday matinee.
The early audience signals point the same direction. Preview-night crowds skewed heavily toward families and casual fans rather than the opening-night lore faithful, and the word of mouth coming out of those screenings has been warm, low-stakes-adventure talk rather than discourse-war ammunition. We will know by Monday whether that translates into the kind of legs a Memorial Day release lives on. Tracking has the four-day frame ambitious, and Disney needs it to be, because this film is carrying the entire 2026 Star Wars calendar on its back. There is no series airing this year, and the next theatrical entry is a long way off.
It is worth appreciating the craft gamble underneath the release, too. The series pioneered the volume, the wraparound LED stage that replaced location shoots with real-time digital backdrops, and the open question inside the industry has been whether volume-built imagery holds up when projected at true theatrical scale rather than compressed onto a streaming bitrate. Favreau reportedly pushed the toolset hard for the film, and the reviews praising the visuals suggest the technology cleared the bar. Every studio with a virtual-production pipeline is quietly taking notes this weekend.
The BR team’s advice for the weekend: see it big, see it loud, and calibrate your expectations to what this actually is. Do not walk in expecting a saga film with trumpets and lineage revelations. Walk in expecting the show you already love at a scale it has never had, a big screen finally doing justice to the puppet work and starfield vistas that a sixty-five-inch panel can only gesture at. The film’s ambitions are modest. Its craft, by nearly every account, is not.
Whatever the Monday numbers say, today is a strange kind of landmark. The franchise that invented the modern blockbuster spent seven years off the theatrical board, and its return is headlined not by a Skywalker but by a foundling and the bounty hunter who refused to give him up. That is either a franchise in creative retreat or a franchise that finally figured out what its audience loves most. Possibly both. The box office will pick a narrative by Tuesday, and we will be here to argue with it.
The box office math deserves spelling out, because the comparisons this weekend will get lazy. The last Star Wars film to open over Memorial Day was “Solo” in 2018, which pulled $103 million across the four-day holiday and got branded a disappointment so decisively that it arguably caused this seven-year drought. Anything in that neighborhood for a film built from a TV property will be read as a win by some outlets and an alarm bell by others, and both takes will be about narrative rather than math. The number that actually matters is the second weekend. Family films with warm word of mouth hold; fan-service films without it collapse. By June we will know which one this is.
One craft note we hope the big screen finally makes undeniable: Grogu is a puppet. A genuinely astonishing one, animatronic in most shots, built and puppeteered by artists who deserve their flowers, with digital assistance reserved for the moments physics will not allow. On a television screen that craft reads as cute. Projected forty feet tall, every servo-driven ear twitch and eye adjustment becomes visible artistry, and we suspect a lot of casual viewers are about to understand for the first time why the effects community talks about this character with reverence. Practical craft is the one Star Wars tradition no era has managed to ruin.
What Do You Think? Does a 64% critic score actually matter for a film engineered this precisely for family audiences on a holiday weekend, or are we past the era when Star Wars reviews moved tickets? Is graduating a streaming series to theaters the future of the franchise or an admission that the movies no longer lead? And what does Sigourney Weaver’s arrival as Ward signal about where Favreau and Filoni’s corner of the galaxy goes after this weekend?
See you on the next binge!
