The Mandalorian and Grogu

Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu, directed by Jon Favreau, hit theaters May 22, 2026. First theatrical Star Wars movie in seven years, and it arrives with naked contempt for the audience. Calling it a movie feels like consumer fraud. This is three or four episodes of what would have been The Mandalorian Season 4, stitched together and sold at IMAX prices to people Lucasfilm assumes are too distracted to notice.

Din Djarin (Pedro Pascal on the mic; more often body doubles Brendan Wayne and Lateef Crowder in the suit) works bounty jobs for the fledgling New Republic with his adopted apprentice Grogu. Colonel Ward (Sigourney Weaver) sends them to retrieve Rotta the Hutt, Jabba’s son, from captivity on the moon of Shakari. In exchange the Hutt Twins will tip them to a rogue Imperial warlord, Commander Coin. Get the slug. Bring him back.

That is the entire movie. What follows is a chain of fetch quests glued to action so relentless and consequence-free it plays as ambient noise. Leave for popcorn, take a call, befriend the usher, come back mid-fight: the plot is exactly where you left it. Nowhere. It was never going anywhere.

I should say where I stand. The Acolyte was bad enough, and offensive enough to what the Lucas saga meant to a lot of us, that it pulled me into talking about this franchise hard again. So when the first theatrical Star Wars in seven years turns out to be a streaming season in a trench coat, sold as a film, yeah. That is not good.

Do not judge this as a movie. It has the bones of a low-rent streaming show. Go to Shakari, bar fight, escape. Go to Nal Hutta, pit fight, escape. Go somewhere else, fight more, escape. Each chunk resets like its own episode with a mini-climax. Transitions carry the drama of a Netflix autoplay countdown. The 2008 Clone Wars theatrical did the same stitch job and earned a 17% on Rotten Tomatoes. Eighteen years later, with a near-$200 million budget and seven years of runway, Lucasfilm walked into that wall on purpose.

The dialogue is worse than George Lucas dialogue. Every line explains what just happened or previews what is about to. Literal. On the nose. Robotic. It feels like early ChatGPT, not a human writing for mouths. Whatever the process, the result is Netflix Second Screen philosophy: you do not need your eyes on the frame. Passive audio is enough to keep up. Hutts in lore can speak Common but mostly use Huttese as cultural flex. Trailers already made Common-speaking Hutts feel wrong. In the movie it is worse. They speak Huttese with subtitles, then immediately repeat themselves in Common so you never have to look up from TikTok.

Here is the full list of moments where you genuinely believe a main character might die:

…

Empty. Two hours of action with zero tension. The story is not tied to anything lore-important. It does not set up anything that matters next. You never think Mando or Grogu are in real danger. No stakes, no consequences, nothing matters. Skip the film and you miss nothing in the timeline. Status quo at the end matches the start. Nothing changes.

Visually it is so dark that tracking the fights becomes eye homework. Multiple critics called the image muddy and the choreography hard to read. Deliberate, and cowardly. Darkness hides shoddy CGI the way a heavy filter hides a bad photo: fine until you notice, then it is all you see. The original trilogy had a fraction of this tech and stays legible almost fifty years later.

The roster is a talent waste. Sigourney Weaver, Ellen Ripley herself, shows up as angry police chief yelling at the rogue cop. Paycheck energy. The performance announces she does not give a damn about Star Wars. Jeremy Allen White voices Rotta so distractingly human inside a CGI slug that it never commits to the creature. Other Hutts sound like Hutts. Rotta sounds like “yeee what’s up little bro.” Critics called the voice “off.” They are being polite. Uncanny valley: a recognizable human cadence trapped in a slug. Pascal, billed as the lead, is mostly a voice actor while two other performers wear the suit. Even the vocal turn reads distant. Trailers tease Hutts yanking his helmet, shaming him, threatening to fence the armor. Minutes later they toss the helmet back, willingly, out of character. Why? So Pedro can leave set and return to the booth. Pedro Pascal is not the Mandalorian. The suit guys are.

A standard ticket runs $15 to $22 depending on market. IMAX pushes past $25. Every dollar on this is wasted. It is not a film. Treat it as the marketing scam it is. Judge it as content. The content is not worth your time. An insult to Star Wars and to the audience. One out of ten.

Do not pay theatrical prices. Do not hunt it on Disney+ when it shows up in eight weeks. Spend the money and the hours on literally anything else.