Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu (2026) [Movie review]

The Mandalorian and Grogu marks Star Wars’ return to the big screen. 7 years after Bob Iger and J.J. Abrams looked at Rise of Skywalker and shrugged, we now have the equivalent of Universal adapting Buck Rogers to feature film length for European theatrical bows. But, what does it mean to the modern world?

In 2019, Martin Scorsese said that Marvel movies were not cinema. This was a reasonable critical position, thoughtfully articulated, about the difference between films designed to deliver genre satisfactions within a predictable franchise architecture and films that attempt to genuinely surprise the people watching them. The ensuing discourse was enormous, as discourse about whether superhero movies count as art tends to be, and Scorsese emerged from it as a sort of symbolic figurehead for the old-guard cinema position against the IP-industrial complex.

Scorsese is just doing pals a solid at this point

In February 2026, the official Star Wars social media account posted a clip of Martin Scorsese voicing an Ardennian fry cook in The Mandalorian and Grogu and captioned it “absolute cinema.”

This is the funniest thing that has happened in the Star Wars franchise since at least The Last Jedi, and it happened entirely in a two-word caption. Scorsese, for the record, is great in his approximately four minutes of screen time as Hugo Durant, the fry cook who gestures with all four of his hands and talks in his familiar fast cadence and raises his big bushy eyebrows while providing intel on the Hutts to a Mandalorian bounty hunter.

He is funnier than Jeremy Allen White, who is voicing a CGI Hutt in the same film. He is funnier than most of the intentionally funny things in The Mandalorian and Grogu. He appears to have understood the assignment in a way that can only be described as deeply professional, and his cameo is the film’s single most entertaining sequence, which is either a compliment to Scorsese or a commentary on the film surrounding him depending on how charitable you want to be.

There is a version of The Mandalorian and Grogu that is exactly what it should be: the first Star Wars film in seven years, arriving after a franchise drought that has made even moderate Star Wars fans genuinely nostalgic for the theatrical experience of sitting in a large dark room with a crowd of people who all agreed in advance to feel things together about characters from a franchise that has been running since 1977.

That version exists in patches throughout the film, mostly in the sequences where Göransson’s score is doing maximum work and the IMAX photography is making the galaxy feel genuinely large and the Grogu puppetry is doing what the Grogu puppetry always does, which is communicate something so immediately and specifically emotional that you stop thinking about the production apparatus behind it.

I like the Hutts

The other version of The Mandalorian and Grogu is two and a half episodes of a television series that have been upgraded to a theatrical budget and released at theatrical prices. That version is also present, in the stretches between action sequences where the storytelling is doing exactly what three seasons of The Mandalorian did and doing it with the same craft and the same limitations and nothing additional that the theatrical canvas is contributing except scale.

The honest answer to the question of which version is the real film is that both versions are the real film and they occupy the same 132 minutes, and the experience of watching The Mandalorian and Grogu is the experience of watching both versions simultaneously.

The seven-year gap matters more than it should. Star Wars has been continuously present in the cultural conversation through the Disney+ series, the animated productions, the merchandise, the theme park expansions, the inescapable omni-presence that the franchise has maintained since Disney acquired Lucasfilm in 2012. But theatrical Star Wars has a specific emotional weight that streaming Star Wars does not replicate, and Favreau’s film understands this in the way it approaches its action sequences and production design while somewhat underestimating it in the way it approaches its story.

A theatrical Star Wars film, particularly the first theatrical Star Wars film in seven years, carrying the weight of the franchise’s return to the format where it was born, probably needed to be about something slightly larger than a Mandalorian bounty hunter retrieving Jabba the Hutt’s surprisingly gentle son from the planet where he has become a celebrity.

The mission itself is fine, as missions go. Colonel Ward, played by Sigourney Weaver with the authority of someone who has been fighting in space since 1979, assigns Din Djarin and Grogu to find Rotta the Hutt, return him to the extended Hutt family, and collect in exchange the location of Janu Coyne, an Imperial warlord who has been a fugitive since the Empire fell. This is a clean heist-adjacent structure that Favreau and Filoni execute with professional competence.

The problem is that Rotta the Hutt, voiced by Jeremy Allen White as CGI alien Jabba’s-son-who-turned-out-nice, is more interesting as a concept than as a character. White is charming in the role, Favreau cast him because both of them have made movies about chefs and Rotta is sort of running a celebrity kitchen, but the character does not have enough screen time to develop into anything that justifies the structural weight the film places on the Hutt family subplot.

There is a Rancor-like creature in Rotta’s arena that the film dispatches efficiently. There is an AT-AT that collapses down a mountainside in a genuinely spectacular IMAX sequence. There are Embo appearances that the Clone Wars faithful will greet with appropriate enthusiasm.

And there is Grogu. This is the part of the review where the honest critical accounting gets complicated by the reality that Grogu is still, in 2026, the most effective single element of anything he appears in, and the puppetry that brings him to life on the theatrical screen is doing something measurably different from what it does on a television. The scale of the IMAX frame makes the practical puppet work more present, more physical, more undeniably real than the streaming experience allows.

Favreau and Sigourney Weaver were apparently talking about how to work with Grogu between takes, and Weaver was picking him up and talking to him as if he were an actual person, and the film creates enough moments from that dynamic to make Colonel Ward and Grogu’s relationship the most emotionally alive thing in the movie. This is both a tribute to Weaver’s specific gift for genuine warmth and a reflection of the film’s structural reality, which is that the non-Grogu scenes are doing their jobs competently without doing them memorably.

Scorsese is a four armed monkey man. That’s what you get for making Kundun!

Pedro Pascal is in the film in the sense that his voice is in the film and he appears briefly without his helmet and his set doubles Brendan Wayne and Lateef Crowder are doing the physical work in armor for most of the production. This has always been the specific covenant of the Mandalorian character, that the helmet stays on and the performance lives in the posture and voice and what the writing gives the character to do.

It works on television, where the intimacy of the format compensates for the physical distance the helmet creates. It works less completely in a theatrical IMAX context, where the scale of the image makes the physical absence of Pascal in frame more legible and the emotional connection between the audience and the Mandalorian more dependent on score and editing rather than performance.

Göransson’s score is, without qualification, the best thing in the film. It was always the best thing in the series, and the theatrical upgrade gives it a spatial presence and dynamic range that the Disney+ compression can only approximate. There are moments in The Mandalorian and Grogu where the gap between the film you are watching and a great film closes entirely, and those moments are all happening while Göransson’s themes are running. This is not a criticism of the film. It is an honest account of where the creative energy of the production is most concentrated, and it happens to be in the score rather than the script.

The critical split on The Mandalorian and Grogu, which sits at 61% on Rotten Tomatoes against 88% from audiences with a CinemaScore of A-, is the most accurate possible measurement of what the film is. Critics are measuring it against the standard of what a theatrical Star Wars film should achieve given the seven-year wait and the franchise’s cultural weight. Audiences are measuring it against whether they had a good time watching Din Djarin and Grogu in a large dark room with Göransson’s score playing at theatrical volume. Both measurements are reasonable. Both produce different verdicts from the same 132 minutes.

The box office, $91-94 million over the Memorial Day four-day weekend, makes The Mandalorian and Grogu Disney’s best opening of 2026 and a commercial success by any practical standard.

The comparison to Solo: A Star Wars Story, which opened similarly and went on to be the first Star Wars film to lose money, is the one that the studio will be watching most carefully, because the trajectory rather than the opening is what determines whether the franchise’s return to theaters becomes the beginning of something or just another chapter in a story about how hard it is to maintain franchise momentum when the IP is everywhere all the time and the theatrical window is being asked to justify its existence against streaming availability.

The Mandalorian and Grogu is a good time at the movies. It is not a great Star Wars film. It is the film that the franchise needed to make to get back into theaters and the film the franchise needed to make to demonstrate that theatrical Star Wars remains viable after seven years away.

Whether those are the same film or different films depends on how much you think theatrical Star Wars should be asked to do versus how much it just needs to show up and be itself, and after seven years without it, there is a real argument that showing up and being itself, complete with Göransson and Grogu and Sigourney Weaver picking up the puppet between takes, is enough.

Martin Scorsese captioned his Gangs of New York trailer “absolute cinema.” The Star Wars account captioned his fry cook cameo the same way. Both uses of the phrase are correct according to their own internal logic, which is maybe the most honest thing the franchise has communicated about its own relationship to cinema in years.

Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu is in theaters now via Walt Disney Studios. Star Wars: Starfighter is announced for May 2027.