Happy Sunday, and welcome to a new edition of “This Week, In a Galaxy Far, Far Away“. We’re officially three months away from the release of The Mandalorian and Grogu, and boy, what a difference a trailer can make. Regular readers of this column may know that I have not been the biggest fan of the idea of this movie, nor the way Disney and Lucasfilm have been selling it so far. I am now officially aboard the new Razor Crest.
We’ll get to all of that below, but before we get to it, you might be interested in checking out our latest Character Spotlight on the Fourth Sister. We also had a regular SWNN Live! show this Thursday night, where Tyler, Tom, and Luke broke down every detail of the new Mandalorian and Grogu trailer. And one final thing: remember that you are very welcome to join our SWNN Discord server, where we discuss all of these things, and so much more pop culture!
Three Things That May Have Flown Casual
The Force Unleashed: Tony Gilroy says he now has the liberty to speak about the parallelisms between Andor and U.S. politics, even if I would argue that the reading between the lines wasn’t particularly hard six months ago, and the new interview isn’t as eye-opening as advertised. But Gilroy is always a good chat, and he also sort of addressed that stupid rumor about Dave Filoni not being a fan of the show.Gaming updates: So what’s going on with the new Star Wars games? It looks like Galactic Racer will be the next game to be released, but what’s up with Zero Company? I assume we won’t hear about that one until later in the year; for now, we have new details of the Galactic Racer campaign here.Publishing updates: These are trying times for Star Wars comics, but we’re still getting previews for what’s to come in the next few months. A brief glimpse at the May releases came out this week, along with the announcement of a new miniseries of one-shot comics celebrating 10 years of Rogue One.
The Mandalorian and Grogu Reveals Excellent Trailer: Will the It Finally Earn Some Momentum?
I was in the room during the Star Wars Celebration panel last year where they revealed a two-minute trailer for The Mandalorian and Grogu, which was split in two parts: a one-minute fight filmed as a continuous shot of Din Djarin busting into an AT-AT’s cockpit, and then some random snippets of footage. I also saw, of course, the 90-second teaser for the film that came out in September. But the trailer that was released this week was the first time that I actually started to care for this movie.
The problem here is that I still don’t quite know what to expect, or what to be content with. Will I be satisfied if it’s just a two-hour version of an episode of The Mandalorian, with more action and a larger frame? Or is the formula doomed to fail from the start, in my eyes, because this story should have been on TV all along? Of course, the movie will have to answer this question, but it’s still an interesting exercise for me to figure out what exactly I expect from this movie — mostly because I know exactly what I expect from Starfighter next year.
The Mandalorian (Pedro Pascal) and Rotta the Hutt in Lucasfilm’s THE MANDALORIAN AND GROGU. Photo courtesy of Lucasfilm. © 2026 Lucasfilm Ltd™. All Rights Reserved.
I think that the new trailer gave me a pretty good idea of what I want out of the movie: to experience Star Wars on the big screen once again. My understanding of a Star Wars story on the big screen implies larger stakes than the average TV episode or even season. I want spectacle, but I want the scope of the narrative to feel epic. For better or worse, every Star Wars movie satisfies this criteria; the quality is then another thing. Because of course I want it to be good. But that’s already the bare minimum for any movie I go see.
So the new trailer gave me exactly what I needed. But will that be enough to satisfy general audiences? We have Pedro Pascal’s face, and we have Martin Scorsese as a voice in the movie. (That’s my first question if I ever get to talk to Jon Favreau about this, by the way…) We have the Hutts, and we have Embo. And we have little knowledge of what the story will be — although we can kind of start putting 2+2 together: Sigourney Weaver’s Colonel Ward sends Din after Rotta the Hutt, for a reason we don’t fully know yet, but the Hutt Twins find out about this and send Embo, the bounty hunter from The Clone Wars after him.
The part that interests me the most is the Grogu side of the film. We see him meditating in a very different setting (that might be a flashback of sorts), and it’s clear that he’s not in the title of the movie for promotional purposes only; he has some integral part to play as well, and his arc will be as important as Din’s. (Or so I hope.) And we also don’t know yet how the Shadow Council plays a role in all of this… Perhaps they are in cahoots with the Hutts? For more on the trailer, you can check out Aled’s excellent breakdown.
Grogu in Lucasfilm’s THE MANDALORIAN AND GROGU. Photo courtesy of Lucasfilm. © 2026 Lucasfilm Ltd™. All Rights Reserved.
Are trailers enough these days to sway people into the theater? General audiences find out about new releases through TikTok or Instagram reels, after all, and that’s where this movie will fight its real battles. Will the soundbites from the press tour be enough to sell the movie, or the 15-second spots? But dropping this right before Hoppers was a pretty good idea, as the kids going to the theater to see the new Pixar movie will find out about it by watching the trailer before the movie starts. And that way you are also selling it to young parents.
All in all, I am choosing to be positive about this movie. I think it will perform well enough for Disney and Lucasfilm to be happy with the experiment, but also happy that next year they have another Star Wars movie that they can actually sell as that — and with Ryan Gosling, no less. If The Mandalorian and Grogu makes $600M worldwide, I think we should be more than happy with it. And if it is able to reinvigorate the brand in theater-goers’ eyes, then all the more merit to it.
(L-R) Grogu and The Mandalorian (Pedro Pascal) in Lucasfilm’s THE MANDALORIAN AND GROGU. Photo courtesy of Lucasfilm. © 2026 Lucasfilm Ltd™. All Rights Reserved.
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Have a great week!
Miguel Fernández is a Spanish student that has movies as his second passion in life. His favorite movie of all time is The Lord of the Rings, but he is also a huge Star Wars fan. However, fantasy movies are not his only cup of tea, as movies from Scorsese, Fincher, Kubrick or Hitchcock have been an obsession for him since he started to understand the language of filmmaking. He is that guy who will watch a black and white movie, just because it is in black and white.