‘The Mandalorian and Grogu’ Is On Track To Be the Worst-Performing Star Wars Film Ever Made

The Star Wars franchise has weathered box office disappointments before. ‘Solo: A Star Wars Story’ was supposed to be a sure thing, and it became a cautionary tale. But what is happening right now with ‘The Mandalorian and Grogu’ appears to be shaping up as something even more alarming, a fall from grace for two of the most beloved characters in the entire Disney-era galaxy.

Din Djarin and Grogu are not strangers to success. Their Disney+ series was a cultural phenomenon that essentially revived mainstream enthusiasm for the Star Wars brand during a period when the sequel trilogy had left audiences divided. The leap to the big screen was meant to capitalize on all of that goodwill, supported by a substantial investment from the studio and a release date anchored to one of Hollywood’s biggest weekends of the year.

The film tallied an estimated $82 million in domestic ticket sales through its first three days in theaters, representing the lowest opening haul for a Star Wars title ever released by Disney. That opening weekend, while slightly above some analyst projections, came in below the disastrous benchmark set by ‘Solo: A Star Wars Story,’ which had itself earned around $84 million in its domestic three-day debut. The fact that a movie widely regarded as a Star Wars failure now outpaced ‘The Mandalorian and Grogu’ in opening weekend terms was a sobering data point for the industry.

What followed opening weekend made things considerably worse. The film suffered a steep second-weekend decline of around 70%, followed by an estimated third weekend of roughly $10 million domestically. Those kinds of drops are the stuff of box office nightmares, the sort of trajectory that signals audiences are simply not recommending the film to others, regardless of how many people showed up opening weekend out of franchise loyalty.

In its third weekend, the film fell to sixth place on the domestic chart with a 61% drop, becoming the fastest Star Wars film in franchise history to exit the domestic top five. Its fourth weekend delivered further pain, with the film grossing just $4.7 million domestically, a drop of 53.1% from the prior weekend.

Making matters more embarrassing, the movie was beaten in its second weekend by two low-budget films from first-time YouTube directors. ‘Backrooms’ is a $10 million horror movie from 20-year-old creator Kane Parsons, and ‘Obsession’ was directed by Curry Barker, a 26-year-old who found fame on YouTube and TikTok. The optics of a $165 million Star Wars film losing its weekend to a $10 million indie horror project sent shockwaves through the entertainment press.

The film is now on course to become the lowest-grossing Star Wars film of all time, falling below ‘Solo: A Star Wars Story,’ which grossed $393.2 million worldwide despite its own troubled production. The combined production and marketing budgets shown in the original post, totalling $300 million, paint a bleak picture of the film’s financial future.

The film received a 62% critics’ score and a significantly higher 87% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes, which suggests that the people who did see it largely enjoyed the experience, making the underperformance more of a demand problem than a quality crisis. Still, positive word-of-mouth clearly was not enough to reverse the freefall once the initial opening weekend crowd had moved on.

There is a silver lining of sorts: although ‘The Mandalorian and Grogu’ is underperforming badly, it will not lose the studio as much money as ‘Solo’ did in absolute terms, given that ‘Solo’ carried a far higher production budget that ballooned as high as $300 to $400 million due to its notorious reshoots. But that comparison offers cold comfort for a franchise that was counting on Mando and Grogu to launch a new era of Star Wars cinema.

The deeper question now is what comes next for a franchise that has struggled to find its theatrical footing since the conclusion of the sequel trilogy. Whether Disney pivots its Star Wars strategy or doubles down remains to be seen, but the numbers will be hard to ignore for a very long time.

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