Review: The Mandalorian and Grogu (2026)

Seven years after Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, Star Wars finally returns to the big screen with The Mandalorian & Grogu. In the time since, the franchise has largely lived on Disney+ through an ever-expanding slate of television series — some successful, some decidedly less so — spearheaded in large part by Jon Favreau and Dave Filoni. And while The Mandalorian once felt like a refreshing shot in the arm for the franchise, this cinematic continuation unfortunately exposes just how thin the formula has become.

It brings me no joy to say that this movie commits the one unforgivable sin a Star Wars film can commit: it’s boring.

Not messy. Not ridiculous. Not even aggressively bad. Just boring. There’s so little urgency or emotional investment attached to anything happening on screen that the film ends up sleepwalking from one set piece to another without ever giving the audience a reason to care. There’s never a genuine sense of danger, consequence, or sacrifice hanging over our protagonists. Din Djarin and Grogu themselves barely seem invested in what they’re doing, which leaves the audience emotionally stranded. If the characters don’t really give a shit, why should we?

To the film’s credit, it certainly looks like Star Wars. The production design is strong, the visual effects are polished, and the soundscape absolutely rips in a cinema. Ludwig Göransson once again delivers phenomenal work, providing the movie with a sense of grandeur and emotion that the screenplay itself often lacks. In many ways, Göransson is doing the heavy lifting here, desperately trying to inject mythic weight into material that rarely earns it.

But despite the impressive technical package, the movie constantly feels strangely small. Nearly every scene feels shot in isolation, as though the actors were never in the same room together. We rarely see more than three or four characters interacting at once, and over time that repetition becomes incredibly noticeable. The galaxy far, far away suddenly feels tiny — not in an intimate, character-driven way, but in a budgetary, creatively constrained way. For a franchise built on sweeping worlds, political conflict, and operatic storytelling, the film feels weirdly boxed in.

And that ultimately becomes the biggest problem with The Mandalorian & Grogu: it never justifies its own existence as a theatrical experience.

Even the weaker Star Wars films at least swing for the fences. They aim for mythmaking. They try to expand the universe, deepen the lore, or push the saga into new territory. Here, there’s almost no ambition whatsoever. The film doesn’t meaningfully evolve the mythology surrounding the Mandalorians, Grogu, or the post-Empire galaxy. By the time the credits roll, you’re left asking a pretty damning question: why did this need to be a movie? Nothing here feels too large for television. In fact, most of it feels like a slightly more expensive Disney+ special stretched to feature length.

And yet… Grogu is still cute. That much remains undeniable. Which honestly makes the whole thing even more disappointing. Seasons 1 and 2 of The Mandalorian captured something Star Wars had been missing for years: simplicity, sincerity, and a sense of adventure. This film feels like the exhausted end point of that creative momentum rather than a triumphant evolution of it.

A devastating and genuinely regrettable misfire from Lucasfilm. A bummer, honestly.