[COLUMN] The Mandalorian and Grogu Is Content To Be Content | by Darren Mooney

Note: This piece contains discussion of things that happen in The Mandalorian and Grogu. To describe them as spoilers would be to imply that they have consequence. However, if you are planning to see the film and have not gotten around to it yet, be aware that the third act is discussed within this piece. Otherwise, we’re a-go on the Mando piece.

If nothing else, The Mandalorian and Grogu confirms that Star Wars is a television franchise now.

This obviously was not always the case. Along with Jaws, the original Star Wars helped to codify the idea of the summer blockbuster. For forty years, Star Wars was synonymous with cinematic event storytelling. The Force Awakens remains the highest grossing film of all time at the domestic box office. The franchise has grossed more than $10bn at the global box office across just twelve films, unadjusted for inflation, making it the third highest-grossing theatrical franchise ever.

However, this was not enough for the Walt Disney Corporation, which sought to leverage the success of the franchise to bolster their nascent streaming service. Disney+ launched with one hell of a hook for potential customers. The first new show to stream on the service was The Mandalorian, a Star Wars television show with incredibly high production value and a genuine sense of scale. The promise was that streaming could offer customers movie-quality entertainment in their own homes.

In the six or so years since The Mandalorian premiered, the promise of streaming has been revealed to be a lie. It was always a lie. It was never a sustainable business model to send big budget media directly to a subscription service, as the companies themselves have come to realize. The studios have managed to inch their services towards profitability by both cutting down on spending, removing content and introducing ad tiers, offering viewers the very definition of “less for more.”

It seems safe to acknowledge with hindsight that streaming damages brands. Over the long term, Disney has seen the value of its Marvel and Star Wars properties decline as their availability on streaming increased. The streaming performance of those brands has deteriorated with each subsequent streaming release, as they become more and more associated with streaming in the mind of consumers. Skeleton Crew and the latest season of Daredevil did not even chart on Nielsen.

There is a fairly logical reason for this. Streaming content is provided to users for a fixed monthly fee. Viewers do not assign a specific value to an individual streaming show or movie. For many subscribers who pay for Disney+ to appease their children, any streaming media is functionally “free.” It has been long demonstrated that people tend to devalue things that they do not pay for. These companies tell consumers what their product is worth, and – in this case – it is nothing.

To underscore this point, there is strong evidence that even a modest, low-effort and under-performing theatrical release is actually a boon for those films when they arrive on streaming. And one can see that the studios understand this. Over the past couple of years, Disney has made a concerted effort to send movies that originated as streaming projects to theatres, with impressive financial results: Alien: Romulus, Freakier Friday, Moana 2, Lilo & Stitch.

And so a large part of what The Mandalorian and Grogu is trying to do is to repair this self-inflicted wound to one of the most beloved intellectual properties in the world, and to transition Star Wars from a streaming franchise to a theatrical series once again. It feels in some ways like trying to lock the stable doors after the horse has bolted. It has been over six years since the last theatrical Star Wars movie, and Disney has conditioned audiences to think of Star Wars as a perk on Disney+.

However, one of the bigger issues is that The Mandalorian and Grogu does not really make an argument for itself as a movie. When a television series transitions into cinema, there is an implicit understanding that it needs a value-add to bring the audience along. So, for example, when Star Trek jumped from television to film, it hired director Robert Wise, who had won four Oscars for his work on West Side Story and The Sound of Music, to provide a sense of scale.

On television, it took months for Star Trek to render a sequence of the Enterprise exchanging a single volley of fire with a Klingon ship. Whatever issues existed with Star Trek: The Motion Picture, and they were myriad, the film provided a sense of scale that differentiated it from the television series. Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan doubled down by doing things the show never could, like killing off Spock (Leonard Nimoy) and introducing Kirk’s (William Shatner) bastard son (Merritt Butrick).

When Star Trek: The Next Generation made the same leap to the big screen with Star Trek: Generations, it marked the occasion by killing off James T. Kirk, destroying the Enterprise and bringing in screen icon Malcolm McDowell to chew the scenery. The X-Files: Fight the Future recruited Oscar-nominee Armin Mueller-Stahl to lend it some gravity, blew up a building and had Mulder (David Duchovny) and Scully (Gillian Anderson) almost kiss. These films felt like events.

To put it simply, The Mandalorian and Grogu does not feel like an event. Jon Favreau has acknowledged that he had written a fourth season of The Mandalorian by the time that Disney told him to make a movie, and though he insists that he started from scratch, the film does feel like a collection of ideas for the television season, just with big mythological elements like Bo Katan (Katee Sackhoff) and Grand Admiral Thrawn (Lars Mikkelsen) stripped out.

To start with, there is a lot of television nonsense in The Mandalorian and Grogu. The villain of the first half is Commander Coin (Jonny Coyne), who was introduced in the penultimate episode of The Mandalorian. The villains of the second half are the Hutt Twins, from The Book of Boba Fett. The film features the bounty hunter Embo, alongside a grown-up Rotta the Hutt (Jeremy Allen White), both from The Clone Wars. Garazeb "Zeb" Orrelios (Steve Blum) is ported over from Rebels.

The film never gives the audience a reason to care about any of these characters beyond their attachment to preexisting continuity. Indeed, there is something almost sadistic about Favreau’s decision to pick Commander Coin as the film’s decoy antagonist, given that the character was introduced in an exposition scene alongside far more interesting performers like Xander Berkeley or Brian Gleeson, who have far more screen presence and would be more engaging to watch.

What little star power exists comes from the inclusion of Oscar-nominated science-fiction icon Sigourney Weaver, and a small role from Martin Scorsese. Weaver is a pretty great “get” for the movie, which has featured her heavily in advertising. However, she is saddled with a nonsense exposition part, effectively filling in the role played by Captain Carson Teva (Paul Sun-Hyung Lee) on the show.

The other new additions are wasted. Despite the series making great use of Werner Herzog, Scorsese is relegated to a computer-generated voiceover role. The most notable new member of the ensemble is Jeremy Allen White as Rotta the Hutt. Despite good performances in movies like The Iron Claw or Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere, White is still arguably a streaming star best known for his work on Hulu series The Bear, meaning that he doesn’t really feel like that big a deal.

The Mandalorian and Grogu also struggles to provide a meaningful sense of scale. The Star Wars franchise has a long history of offering spectacle, often by using international locations to flesh out the galaxy far, far away. The original Star Wars famously shot in Tunisia. The Last Jedi shot on Skellig Michael. Even Andor was able to use the Scottish Highlands to great effect. These locations and environments help to make Star Wars seem bigger than other franchises.

In contrast, Jon Favreau has made a big deal of how The Mandalorian and Grogu was the first Star Wars movie to be shot entirely in Los Angeles. While this is great for the regional economy, it is also a choice that is shorthand for “television show.” It was a big deal, for example, when The Pitt committed to shooting its entire season in Los Angeles. What few exotic locations appear within the film are all rendered digitally, lending the movie an unconvincing uncanny quality.

Even the film’s storytelling feels more televisual than cinematic. To put it frankly, nothing meaningful happens over the course of the film to the characters. Nothing important happens in the larger context of the Star Wars universe within the confines of The Mandalorian and Grogu. This is not to argue that the film is lacking for lore. It is stuffed to the gills with cameos and references. However, there is no sense this adventure is any different for Din Djarin (Pedro Pascal) than any other mission.

Writer and director Ryan Coogler once related a story that a fellow screenwriter told him about the difference between film and television. "How she sees movies is you're looking at the most important moment in a character's life,” Coogler explained. “And how she sees television is you're looking at the most important journey in a character's life, and that hit me pretty hard.” This is perhaps simplistic, but it makes sense for franchise fare. To put it bluntly, The Mandalorian and Grogu does not feel like the most important moment in anybody’s life.

To be clear, this doesn’t mean the movie has to have massive universal stakes. The stakes could be personal. Din could fall in love. Grogu could say his first word. Din could die. Grogu could have a growth spurt. Din could decide to throw away his helmet and let the universe see his face. Grogu could encounter a long-lost relative, creating a conflict about Din’s role in his life. Something that makes this story matter to the characters in it. Anything to make it feel like more than just “content.”

There are hints that the movie might build to a thematic or emotional crescendo. At one point, Din is poisoned by a monstrous creature and Grogu is forced to take care of him. It is the most interesting and functional twenty minutes of the movie. Grogu encounters a benign alien (Stephen McKinley Henderson), who warns Grogu that there comes a point where one has to say goodbye. That would be a plot beat worth a movie, but instead Din recovers and life continues as normal.

It is a small thing, but even the structure of the film is lifted directly from the television series. There is an action prologue to the episode, and then the title drop – The Mandalorian, followed by a fade in of and Grogu – set to Ludwig Göransson’s score. This would not be a big deal of itself, but it arrives directly after a unique Mandalorian and Grogu IMAX ident. The film seems unsure whether it wants the audience to think of this as an extended episode of the series or something different and unique.

The problem carries over into the dialogue. Much has been written about the reality of “second screen” exposition, the way that streaming shows are written to repeat dialogue and plot points on the assumption that the audience watching is probably doing other stuff at the same time, like checking their phones. Ben Affleck and Matt Damon talked a lot about how that affects the writing of streaming media while promoting their Netflix movie The Rip.

Despite being a movie that will be screened in theatres where patrons should not be on their phones, The Mandalorian and Grogu is replete with this second screen dialogue. In both of Rotto the Hutt’s first two scenes, he relates (both times to the same character) his back story and already-completed character arc, how he went from being the son of Jabba the Hutt to winning the affection of the crowd in the fighting arena. These scenes are maybe five minutes apart.

There is a moment late in the film in which Grogu rescues Din from the clutches of the Hutt Twins and guides Din to his spaceship. The punchline – and it is a pretty good visual gag – is the realization that a Grogu-sized spaceship will not actually be able to accommodate Din and complete the rescue. Although signposted, it is a funny joke. However, the movie cannot trust itself to communicate the idea visually, so Din has to say “I can’t fit in there” to communicate that he cannot fit in there.

The Mandalorian and Grogu has quite literally a single purpose, one thing that it has to accomplish. It has to remind audiences that Star Wars is a franchise worthy of the cinema. This is most definitely not the way.