Is This The Way?
It feels like a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away since we’ve had a Star Wars film in theatres.
Now that Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu has landed on planet Earth, it looks like the Star Wars franchise could be in trouble, with the film posting the lowest opening weekend for a Star Wars film since Disney took the reins.
Over the four-day Memorial Day weekend, the dynamic duo of Pedro Pascal and Baby Yoda amassed $165 million at the global box office, with $102 million in the North American region and $63 million across the rest of the world.
It seems like a decent effort, only if you forget how well Disney’s biggest Star Wars flop did on its own Memorial Day weekend.
2018’s Solo: A Star Wars Story managed to make $171 million on its Memorial Day opening ($6 million more than The Mandalorian movie) despite losing $70 million and cancelling a planned trilogy focused on the spacebuckling anti-hero.
It has been seven years since fans got a Star Wars film, especially since the conclusive mess that was Episode IX: The Rise of Skywalker, so it’s disheartening that the fruits of Grogu’s labour managed to break the wrong kind of record.
Even if the Mandalorian movie was a generational classic, it would still struggle to meet fruitful numbers, as it relies heavily on watching 3 seasons’ worth of content to fully enjoy it.
Industry analyst David Gross told Agence France-Presse, “These are big numbers, and this is how spin-offs perform…the movie is a piece of the story, and it’s earning a piece of the business.”
With this in mind, it seems that Disney isn’t 100% betting all its money on the popularity of this release.
Based on a report from Variety, studio insiders claimed that 2027’s Star Wars: Starfighter has a better chance of rekindling a new fire for the franchise.
Riding off the high of Project Hail Mary, the film is set to star Ryan Gosling as the lead and contains a purely original storyline that doesn’t rely on other Disney material.
Will Disney be able to bring Star Wars back to the centre of the pop culture paradigm, or will it linger in the back of culture like Anakin’s Force ghost at the end of A New Hope?
