Do you remember 1998? Not for much. Just those weird autumn months where Meet Joe Black, The Siege, and The Waterboy held the cultural zeitgeist captive.
Unpopular take? They didn’t matter. What mattered was what came before them.
Thousands of fans bought tickets to watch Adam Sandler play football. Or Bruce Willis flex military might. They didn’t care. They walked into the theater, saw the thirty-second The Phantom Menace teaser, and walked right out. They got what they needed. A glimpse. A promise. It was a weird loopback moment for the internet, too. The second trailer dropped in QuickTime and got a million downloads in a single day. People realized: the web wasn’t just for cat gifs anymore.
Generations had queued around blocks for VHS tapes in the eighties. They lined up for the Special Editions in ’97. There was fever here. Real heat.
Now? We have The Mandalorian and Grogu coming to theaters this month.
The event movie? Hard to say. Deadline reports suggest this opening weekend could be the worst in Star Wars history.
Think about that. The worst.
Seven years passed since The Rise of Skywalker dragged out a disappointing finale. But before that slump, things were different. The Force Awakens remains the biggest earner in domestic history. The Last Jedi sat comfortably in the top five openings. For a brief window, Disney proved they could replicate the magic. Or at least the money.
Then came November 2019. Disney+ launched. The Mandalorian premiered.
It was supposed to be small potatoes. Low budget. Tight schedule. Jon Favreau admitted later they had to figure out how to make Star Wars work on a device that fits in your palm. “Nobody expected anything for us,” he said. “We were small screen.”
He was right to be nervous. The Clone Wars had been critical darlings but niche products. Animation for kids. Animation for obsessives. Not the mainstream.
Din Djarin changed that. The kid in the cloak became a global icon overnight. “Baby Yoda” wasn’t even an official title. The internet gave him that. And it worked.
So Disney made more stuff. The Book of Boba Fett. Andor. Ahsoka. Skeleton Crew. For the last six years, we have had more live-action hours than all the movies of the previous forty.
Here is the trap. We are drowning in content. Star Wars feels like a Netflix subscription. It feels like Tuesday night streaming.
Does TV translate to cinema? Usually no. Star Trek Into Darkness was the most successful franchise film from its source TV shows? It missed the top ten earners of its year. Marvel learned this the hard way with The Marvels. Two stars plucked directly from television dramas? Box office poison.
Mando and Grogu has a problem. Everyone loves them. That’s good.
Everyone also knows this movie is hitting Disney+ in three months.
Why pay fifteen bucks and fight traffic tonight when you can watch it in your sweatpants later?
Unlike 1999, we weren’t waiting sixteen years for this. It’s barely been three years since season three wrapped. And not with a cliffhanger, but a soft landing. They got married. They farmed. It was peaceful.
Was the audience begging to see what happened next? Hardly.
Narrative attention drifted to Grand Admiral Thrawn. To the Imperial remnants. That plot thread goes to Ahsoka season two, not the cinema.
Favreau is trying to fix it with scale. He shot on IMAX. He built real sets instead of green screening everything into digital voids. He brought in Sigourney Weaver and Martin Scresci. Hollywood royalty as cameos.
Will it work? Maybe.
They are arguably the biggest names in the universe right now. Pedro Pascal is an A-lister. His face sells water and chocolate and post-apocalyptic survival horror. The green baby moves merchandise faster than lightspeed.
But are they Theaters people?
This isn’t Harrison Ford. This isn’t the nostalgic callback for the Gen-Xers who turned their backs after Episode III. This is a plea to younger fans to remember that Star Wars does big screens, too.
It feels fragile. After The Acolyte stumbled? After Skeleton Crew struggled to find a pulse? The pressure is immense.
If this bombs, the pessimists will win. But Lucasfilm has one ace up its sleeve. It’s a far future bet, but a solid one.
Starfighter. Coming 2027.
Ryan Gosling leads. Shawn Levy directs.
A guy who played astronauts in The Martian. A guy who co-wrote and starred in The Fall Guy. And now, Project Hail Mary proves Gosling can carry a movie to the stars.
This feels safer. This feels like the smart play to bring people back. Gosling + Levy = proven ticket sellers. Not necessarily franchise diehards, just general audiences who like movies that actually work.
Maybe The Mandalorian and Grogu is just a distraction. A test run.
Or maybe it proves the model is broken.
Either way. There is nothing else like the big screen for this story. Not VHS. Not 4K streaming on a fifty-inch OLED. You need the noise. The scale.
If one of these movies succeeds, fine. The franchise breathes again.
If neither does? Well. The Force is strong. But maybe we just need a nap first. 🎟️
