Star Wars came back to theaters this weekend, and the verdict from the box office is the most Disney result imaginable: a win that nobody in Burbank is celebrating.
“The Mandalorian and Grogu” opened to roughly $98 million across the four-day Memorial Day frame, taking the No. 1 spot at the domestic box office and ending the seven-year theatrical drought that began when “The Rise of Skywalker” closed out the Skywalker saga in 2019. By any reasonable post-pandemic benchmark, debuting a movie above the nine-figure mark over a holiday weekend is a strong result. By the standard Star Wars set for itself for four decades, it’s the franchise’s softest Disney-era launch — a designation previously held, awkwardly, by 2018’s “Solo: A Star Wars Story.”
The number itself is not the problem. The audience under the number is.
The Demographic Problem Disney Can’t Spin
Studios bury inconvenient data in opening-weekend reports, but they cannot bury it forever. Disney’s own audience breakdown showed that 27% of opening-weekend ticket buyers for “The Mandalorian and Grogu” were under 25. Nine years ago, “The Last Jedi” pulled 37% from that same demographic. A ten-point collapse in the under-25 share is not noise. It is the youngest two generations of moviegoers telling Lucasfilm something the company has spent a decade trying not to hear.
The film was marketed as the family-friendly entry point — bring the kids, meet Grogu in IMAX, buy the plush. The kids did not arrive in the numbers that justify the pitch. What did arrive was the existing fanbase, the people who grew up with the original trilogy and stuck with the franchise through the streaming era. That cohort is loyal, but it is also finite. Franchises that depend on existing fans rather than new ones are franchises in slow managed decline, no matter how good the per-screen averages look.
The Math That Saves the Movie Anyway
What keeps this from being a Solo-level disaster is the budget. Lucasfilm produced “The Mandalorian and Grogu” for roughly $165 million — a number that would have been unthinkable for a theatrical Star Wars film a decade ago. “Solo” cost nearly $300 million and finished its theatrical run at $392 million worldwide, becoming the first Star Wars film in history to lose money in theaters. “Mandalorian and Grogu” needs far less to cross into the green, and its global four-day take of $163 million across 52 territories puts it on a workable path even if the second-weekend drop is brutal.
The leaner budget is the real news, and it is the news Disney would rather not discuss in those terms. The studio has quietly admitted, through the production cost alone, that Star Wars films can no longer command the resources or the audience certainty they did during the Force Awakens era. That is a strategic concession dressed up as fiscal discipline.
Jon Favreau directed, and Dave Filoni — the new co-head of Lucasfilm — executive-produced and co-wrote. Both have built credibility with the streaming-era fanbase. Both also have to answer for an opening that came in below pre-release tracking from analysts who had this film pegged for $115 million or more.
What Happens in Fourteen Days Decides Everything
The second weekend is the only metric that matters now. June arrives with Pixar’s “Toy Story 5” — a film industry trackers expect to open above $150 million and reset franchise records — followed almost immediately by Steven Spielberg’s “Disclosure Day.” Between them, they will compress every dollar of runway “Mandalorian and Grogu” had hoped to capture from the family audience.
A second-weekend hold under 50% would suggest genuine word-of-mouth momentum and give Disney a real argument that the franchise still has theatrical legs. A drop of 60% or more — which is where soft-opening blockbusters typically land when the core fanbase has already shown up — would confirm that this movie was a closed-loop event for existing fans rather than a recruitment tool for new ones.
There are early signs in both directions. Premium large formats, including IMAX, accounted for 53% of the opening — a figure that suggests the people who did show up cared enough to pay for the better seats. Audience scores have been positive. But positive scores from an aging fanbase do not solve the demographic problem; they prove it.
The Streaming Hangover
The seven-year theatrical gap was not an accident. After “The Rise of Skywalker” divided fans and audiences, Lucasfilm pivoted aggressively to Disney+, producing “The Book of Boba Fett,” “Andor,” “Ahsoka,” “Skeleton Crew,” and the three seasons of “The Mandalorian” that made this movie possible. The strategy succeeded on its own terms — Disney+ subscriptions held through the rough patches, and “Andor” in particular earned the kind of critical reception Star Wars films had not enjoyed in years.
But streaming success rewires audience expectations. Viewers who watched seven years of Star Wars on the couch, for the cost of a monthly subscription, are not automatically motivated to spend $50 on tickets and concessions for two-plus hours of the same characters they can stream at home next quarter. Disney is now testing whether streaming and theatrical can coexist for the same IP, and the answer this weekend was: not at the scale it used to.
The cross-platform integration the studio deployed — a new Millennium Falcon: Smugglers Run mission at the theme parks, day-and-date with the film, plus a Fortnite tie-in — suggests Disney itself knows the theatrical event alone is no longer enough. The company has to surround a release with experiences in every channel it controls.
What This Means for “Starfighter”
The next theatrical Star Wars film is “Star Wars: Starfighter,” directed by Shawn Levy and starring Ryan Gosling, scheduled for May 28, 2027. Internally, that project is the one Lucasfilm is betting on to actually reset the franchise — new characters, new corners of the galaxy, no streaming baggage, and the kind of marquee star who can pull non-fans into a theater.
The disappointing-but-survivable performance of “Mandalorian and Grogu” lowers the bar for Starfighter without removing the pressure. Gosling has to do for Star Wars what Tom Cruise did for “Top Gun” in 2022: convince audiences who do not consider themselves franchise fans that this particular movie is worth leaving the house for. That is a much heavier lift than handing the keys to a beloved streaming character and hoping nostalgia closes the deal.
For now, Disney has its $98 million, its No. 1 weekend, and its talking points. What it does not have is evidence that the next generation of moviegoers cares about a galaxy far, far away in the same way the last generation did. That is the data point everything else hinges on, and it is the one the opening weekend confirmed in the worst possible way.
Disclaimer: Box office figures cited in this article reflect studio-reported estimates and final four-day totals as of May 27, 2026. Opening weekend numbers are subject to revision as final audited grosses are released. Budget figures and global totals are based on publicly disclosed studio data and may not reflect all marketing, distribution, or back-end participation costs. Demographic and forecast data are provided for context and do not constitute financial guidance.
