The Mandalorian Movie Is Unprecedented

Hopefully it's also good

Courtesy of Lucasfilm

Let’s put aside all the reasons not to be excited about the recently announced The Mandalorian & Grogu. Try not to remember that the most recent Star Wars movie was The Rise of Skywalker. Forget that middling third season of The Mandalorian. Don’t let Andor permanently raise your standards for spin-offs. And—for the love of God—do not calculate the ratio of announced Star Wars movies to actual releases.

For one thing, a Mandalorian movie seems about as close to an un-cancelable film as Lucasfilm could possibly announce. Jon Favreau isn’t just a known quantity—he’s something of a kingmaker at the studio. His coaching tree now includes two directors, Deborah Chow and Dave Filoni, who have gone on to helm their own Star Wars shows. He also made the film (Iron Man) that launched Disney’s most successful franchise.

Our two title characters also seem to be sure-things. You can put Alden Ehrenreich in the vest, but people won’t flock to the theaters thinking they’re going to see the real Han Solo. Pedro Pascal doesn’t even need to be on set to conjure the full star power of Din Djarin. This movie’s whole production will be like that scene in Jedi with Boushh, Chewie, Jabba, and Threepio—just seven body doubles flailing their arms, waiting for their voices to be dubbed later.

Having two leads without human faces, however, is just one the peculiarities of The Mandalorian & Grogu. Mando and Grogu are far and away the most iconic Star Wars characters to never appear in a movie. And if that made their appearances on the big screen inevitable, I’m glad it’s happening in their own, hopefully self-contained story, and not the Untitled Dave Filoni Mandoverse™ Avengers-style Crossover Film.

What happens when the horse goes before the cart? The silver screen made Darth Vader and Yoda recognizable around the world. Din and Grogu are already on T-shirts in Germany and comics in Japan. It’s a one-in-a-lifetime marketing case study. Rogue One proved a spin-off with new characters could make money. Is a Mando movie a surefire billion-dollar proposition, despite a healthy amount of Star Wars apathy?

Ironically, it’s a problem for which The Mandalorian was originally the cure. The stripped-down, back-to-basics approach of the first season appealed to lapsed fans by taking what was cool about Star Wars and leaving behind the confusing lore and ever-shrinking universe of the movies. Now with a Rey movie also in development, idiots want to make this Mandalorian movie a totem for their side of a culture war. Y’know: Girls go to the Rey movie to get more groovy; boys go to Mando to get more stupider. But The Mandalorian’s original genius was appealing to people who have no idea who Kathleen Kennedy is—not fans who make longform videos about how she’s a nefarious feminist.

The show veered into prequel lore in Season 2 before crashing, disastrously, into the Wookieepedia article for Mandalore in Season 3. The final episode of that most recent season promised a return to self-contained, classic Rick-and-Morty adventures. It set up this movie to be a back-to-basics take on what used to be a back-to-basics show. Still, these characters have logged serious time on the small screen. This movie comes with its own canon. Din has way more backstory than Luke ever did. This film can have a discrete beginning, middle, and end, but someone’s mom is going to wonder why Carl Weathers is dressed like an 11th century Venetian duke.

That’s the final and most important way The Mandalorian & Grogu is unprecedented: It’s jumping from the small to big screen, instead of the other-way-around. For me, Star Wars is always better as a movie. Andor succeeded in spite of its format. Maybe Favreau blows us away with the budget for movie effects.

So I’m nonplussed by this announcement, but I’m just one good trailer away from getting hyped. This movie doesn’t have to remind me why I love Star Wars. It’d be enough for it to remind me why I loved The Mandalorian.