🪐 Star Wars Might Be Losing its Magic... And That’s OK

After more than a decade of false starts and mixed signals that came with trying to serve a fanbase as wide, varied, and multigenerational as Star Wars, it seems Disney and Lucasfilm have settled on a path forward for pleasing the most demanding of longtime fans. They’re sidestepping them.

To be clear, this weekend’s Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu is definitely eager to be a movie for everybody. But it’s also a film that seeks to intentionally pivot away from the complex, ephemeral idea of Star Wars which so many aging, and increasingly divided, fans cling to in the afterglow of childhood memory. In lieu of trying to replicate the “magic” conjured by one of the most culturally significant film trilogies ever made, director Jon Favreau and his co-writers, including new Lucasfilm chief creative officer Dave Filoni, elected to make a movie that never aspires to even attempt the awe or wonderment of George Lucas’ 1977 original. Love or hate the prequels and Disney’s sequel trilogy in the 2010s, that old school “magic” was always a goalpost for a brand that tried. Yet, perhaps taking a hint from the OG Yoda himself, The Mandalorian and Grogu chooses to “do not.”

Released just in time for Memorial Day, here is a summer movie pretty content with being “just” a summer movie, or specifically a shareholder-friendly four-quadrant spectacle based on one of the most lucrative intellectual properties in The Walt Disney Company’s library of content. Rather than pleasing fans who have grown evermore divided over whether it is like their Star Wars (or the nostalgia they hold onto), this movie instead seeks to become a simple adventure serial for a new generation whose concept of Star Wars is unformed, or perhaps only slightly defined by cute little Baby Yoda from the three seasons of The Mandalorian playing on repeat on Disney+. To audiences that young, the original trilogy is something their grandparents might’ve grown up with, or were at least old enough to see in theaters.

If you take a coolly number-based, macro view of brand management, you might even conclude this is the way.

For film critics like myself, who as of press time are the only folks to have seen the movie, the decision seems cynical. While there are colleagues who liked Mandalorian and Grogu better than I did in my review, a general consensus seems to be that the new film plays more like a truncated fourth season of The Mandalorian than a standalone Star Wars epic. The stakes are small, the character work minimal, and the plot thinly in service of Baby Yoda doing adorable things while Mando says gruffly laconic lines before jetting off.

While the film is filled with easter eggs that cut to the deeper corners of recent Star Wars lore—Filoni was, after all, one of the minds behind The Clone Wars animated series before rising up the Lucasfilm ranks—the picture itself is pretty standalone. It does not want to be a new installment in “the Skywalker Saga” either narratively or in terms of gravitas and emotional complexity. It doesn’t even look aesthetically different from the Disney+ show despite using digital IMAX photography. JJ Abrams or Rian Johnson’s attempts to call on textured Lucas influences like John Ford, and adding in flecks of Coppola or Gosha, was never ever a consideration.

The Mandalorian and Grogu is a straight down-the-middle product intended to give younger audiences more of what they liked from the TV series or get them interested in that sweet, sweet Disney+ content in the first place.

There is an older segment of the audience that will wince at this, but in truth, this turn of events was probably inevitable ever since Disney purchased Lucasfilm in 2012. I still remember dreading at the time the thought of taking Star Wars off the proverbial shelf. Sure, it meant more movies and adventures, and something the next generation could enjoy, but if you keep making Star Wars movies (never mind TV shows, video games, and lunchboxes) ad infinitum, it loses its scarcity. Its specialness.

If you churn out Star Wars like it’s Marvel, DC, Star Trek, or any other brand that’s defined by its perpetuity, it will inevitably cease being that rare, singular thing from a moment in time. It becomes Coke or Pepsi. I might even argue one of the hurdles Disney inadvertently discovered was that while trying to rush out a Star Wars movie every year in the 2010s, they were unable to maintain that level of quality (or at least ambition) that marked the previous six films. In the end, it led to a movie like The Rise of Skywalker, a film tasked with being a grand epic “finale” to a nine-film series that timidly says nothing. It satisfied almost no one.

The Mandalorian and Grogu skips all that weight of expectation in favor of being a mild diversion. It just wants to get to first base and never once contemplates the thrill of a home run. I suspect a lot of critics, including myself, are frustrated by that meager aspiration. But children today will have little preconceived notion of what a Star Wars movie is “supposed” to be. They simply like The Mandalorian.

Admittedly this sets The Mandalorian and Grogu up for more modest expectations at the box office as well. Tracking suggests the new movie will open around $80 to $85 million over Memorial Day weekend. That’s down from what is considered the box office nadir of the brand—2018’s Solo: A Star Wars Story, which grossed $103 million during the same holiday frame eight years ago—but if you stop measuring these by the epic “event” of Star Wars of old, including the sequel trilogy, and start measuring these as just another franchise in a decade defined by diminishing returns, it could go on like this forever. If that’s your goal, then it is definitely some kind of way forward.

— David Crow, Senior Editor

Monday marks the premiere of Spider-Noir in the U.S. on MGM+ (and it will be everywhere else on Amazon Prime Video come May 27). While technically a TV series, it makes a good excuse to dive into noir classics, including for Nicolas Cage, who told us this week about how much Humphrey Bogart’s bemused cynicism in The Maltese Falcon and The Big Sleep influenced him. Consider this both news and a recommendation for some Bogie and Bacall goodness.

If Mando isn’t your bag, this weekend brings about Boots Riley’s wildly ambitious and galaxy-brained I Love Boosters. Both a good hang movie and a not-so-subtle clarion call about the need for collective bargaining in the face of capitalistic oppression, the film imagines a trio of Bay Area fashionista shoplifters (or boosters) triggering a labor revolution. And you just know with Boots that they’re gonna look good.

This week marks both the 30th anniversary of the original Mission: Impossible and the 40th anniversary of Top Gun. Which makes it a shame this Memorial Day doesn’t complete the hat trick by once again being on Cruise control. Eh? Ehh?!

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