Below Solo? Mandalorian & Grogu Box Office Tracks Low

When Solo: A Star Wars Story pulled $84 million over its opening three days back in 2018, it was treated as a disaster. The film became shorthand for franchise fatigue, a cautionary tale about oversaturation, and the reason Disney pumped the brakes on its aggressive Star Wars theatrical slate. Eight years later, Disney is apparently bracing for The Mandalorian and Grogu to open even lower.

According to The Hollywood Reporter, internal Disney estimates place the film's debut at around $80 million over the four-day Memorial Day weekend. Solo pulled $104 million across its first four days. So we're not talking about a close race here; Disney's own projections have their marquee Star Wars comeback trailing the franchise's most notorious flop by a meaningful margin.

That $80 million figure also sits at less than half of the $177.3 million opening earned by The Rise of Skywalker in 2019, the last Star Wars film to hit theaters. Rise of Skywalker was a trilogy closer, so a direct comparison isn't entirely fair, but the gap is still staggering for a franchise that used to be a guaranteed box office event.

Where the wheels came off

Part of the problem is that early marketing hasn't landed. The Super Bowl spot leaned into comedy and was torn apart by fans online, even though it was clearly designed as a spoof of typical big game ads. A clip shown on Jimmy Kimmel Live didn't help either, featuring a scene of Grogu playing with cockpit buttons that felt like it dragged on far too long. I've watched both, and the issue isn't that they're bad in isolation; it's that neither one gave audiences a reason to show up on opening weekend. For a seven-year gap between theatrical releases, the marketing needed to sell urgency. It sold cute instead.

Director Jon Favreau told The Associated Press this week that he wants "to make the next generation feel the way about Star Wars that I did when I saw it for the first time." It's a nice, and he's right that there's an entire generation of kids who've never seen a Star Wars film in a cinema. Whether that translates to tickets is another matter entirely when the character they're being sold on, Grogu, has been available on Disney+ for years and is already plastered across every toy aisle in existence.

The silver lining, if you can call it that, is the budget. Solo was one of the most expensive films ever produced, reportedly costing around $365 million before marketing, with a break-even point near $600 million it never came close to reaching. That film also suffered a chaotic production that saw Disney replace its directors mid-shoot. The Mandalorian and Grogu was reportedly made for around $160 million, making it the cheapest Disney-era Star Wars film. A modest opening hurts less when you haven't bet the farm.

Lucasfilm co-CEO Dave Filoni said back in March that The Mandalorian and Grogu benefits from launching without the weight of expectation that comes with a new trilogy. I think doing a lot of heavy lifting right now. Disney isn't positioning this as a tentpole; they're positioning it as a palate cleanser. And when your own internal tracking has your movie losing to the franchise's biggest bomb, "managing expectations" starts to look less like strategy and more like damage control.

None of this means the film will be bad. Favreau knows how to make crowd-pleasing movies, and Grogu is a merchandising juggernaut for a reason. But Star Wars returning to theaters was supposed to feel like a moment. Instead, it's shaping up to feel like a soft launch, and Disney seems to know it. The film hits theaters over Memorial Day weekend, and if it can't clear Solo's bar, the conversation about what comes next for Star Wars on the big screen is going to get very uncomfortable very fast.