The Force Isn’t With ‘The Mandalorian and Grogu’ as Its Box Office Freefall Gets Harder to Spin

When ‘The Mandalorian and Grogu‘ arrived in theaters over Memorial Day weekend, Lucasfilm had every reason to feel cautiously optimistic. The film opened to $98 million domestically over the four-day holiday frame, recouping its entire reported $165 million production budget in a single weekend. For the first theatrical ‘Star Wars’ release since 2019, that felt like a decent foothold, even if the ceiling wasn’t quite where Disney had hoped.

The mixed signals, however, were there from the start. Critics left the film at a 62% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes, placing it in the same ballpark as ‘Solo: A Star Wars Story’ and ‘Attack of the Clones,’ two of the more divisive entries the franchise has produced. Audiences were warmer, awarding it an 89% audience score on the platform, the highest of any Disney-era ‘Star Wars’ film, alongside an A- CinemaScore. The disconnect between critics and ticketbuyers suggested the film had a passionate base but a narrower general appeal.

That narrowness became impossible to ignore heading into the second weekend. ‘The Mandalorian and Grogu’ brought in just $6.5 million on its second Friday in North American cinemas, representing a 70% drop from its opening day. What had been projected as a $40 million sophomore weekend now looks closer to $25 million, which would push the domestic running total to $136 million after two frames.

Per Deadline, the film is tracking toward a second-weekend total of roughly $25 million, representing a brutal 69% drop from its debut weekend, making it one of the worst sophomore declines in the franchise’s history. For context, that drop is steeper than the one ‘Solo: A Star Wars Story’ suffered during the same period in 2018, when it fell 65%, a collapse that has since become shorthand in Hollywood for franchise disappointment.

The timing made things considerably worse. A24’s buzzy horror film ‘Backrooms,’ directed by 20-year-old YouTube creator Kane Parsons, opened to between $85 and $88 million domestically, earning more than three times the sophomore frame of ‘The Mandalorian and Grogu’ in a single debut weekend. Earlier in the week, the ‘Star Wars’ film had already surrendered the number one spot, eventually slipping all the way to third place behind both ‘Obsession’ and ‘Backrooms,’ marking the largest Friday-to-Friday drop of any Disney-era ‘Star Wars’ release.

With a break-even point widely estimated around $400 million or more, some analysts are now questioning whether the film will even reach $300 million by the end of its theatrical run, raising the prospect of a significant financial loss for Disney and Lucasfilm. The studio has maintained that the film drives value across its broader ecosystem, pointing to Disney Parks integrations and the franchise’s enduring merchandise strength, but those arguments tend to carry less weight when the theatrical trajectory turns this sharply.

The uncomfortable question now sitting at the center of every Lucasfilm conversation is whether years of ‘Star Wars‘ content on Disney+ may have quietly eroded the urgency audiences once felt about seeing the galaxy far, far away on a big screen. Whether you think this collapse is a one-off stumble or a sign of something deeper for the franchise is something worth debating in the comments.