Last night, Star Wars fans dared to interact with a major sporting event in the hopes they’d get to see something tangible from The Mandalorian and Grogu, the franchise’s long-heralded return to theaters for the first time since The Rise of Skywalker. Instead, they got 30 seconds of the titular heroes trekking through the snow—but Disney thinks that matters more than actually telling audiences why they should get their butts in theaters in a few months’ time.
Backlash to the brief Super Bowl spot wasn’t so much about a broader distaste for where The Mandalorian has gone and what it has come to represent about Star Wars in the six-year journey it’s taken from streaming experiment to the pop culture face of the franchise, but more so an increasing confusion as to just what’s going on with the marketing of the new movie.
Considering its high-pressure status as the first Star Wars film project to actually make it off the ground and hit theaters since 2019, there’s been an expectation that The Mandalorian and Grogu would go big on its marketing. Instead, Lucasfilm and Disney have stayed surprisingly low-key about the film. The first official look at the film came in September 2025 and largely focused on vibes and nods to ephemeral Star Wars stuff—an AT-AT walker here, a Hutt there, a random creature from 50-year-old holochess to boot—rather than what the film was really about, and in the near five months since then, the only real thing shown off from the film was a picture of Mando and Grogu. And it sure was a picture of Mando and Grogu!
Hence why the film’s Super Bowl spot—a fluffy homage to prior Budweiser Super Bowl commercials rather than anything directly from the film itself—felt like an odd choice to showcase the film. But according to Disney marketing execs, that was kind of the point: it was less about the film and more about poking people and going, “Remember that you love the Mandalorian and Grogu, unrelated to the entity also known as The Mandalorian and Grogu.”
“Grogu is more than a character; he’s a pop culture phenomenon. Riding alongside the heroic Mandalorian, he brings lightness, humor, joy, and an instant emotional connection that transcends the moment,” Jackson George, Disney executive VP of creative marketing, explained to Variety. “This Big Game spot celebrates how deeply we love and connect with these characters, reminds us of the fun, heart, and spectacle that defines Star Wars, and offers a bite-sized promise of the experience audiences will get when they see these two beloved icons on the big screen.”
Then of course, there’s the aforementioned nod to Budweiser’s classic Clydesdale ads of Super Bowls past—an homage being the perfect opportunity to do something evocative of the movie without having to actually reveal anything about the movie itself. “Our creative and marketing team landed on a unique concept that gave a nod to classic Big Game spots of years past,” Lucasfilm’s own marketing brand lead, Ryan Stankevich, added. “It captured the warmth, humor, and emotional connection between these two beloved characters and was the perfect next step for our campaign as we lead up to their big-screen debut this summer.”
But with just three months to go before the film’s in theaters, it’s not necessarily knowing the plot of the film in advance that has people wary about The Mandalorian and Grogu. After all, The Mandalorian itself has been defined by this kind of mystery box marketing approach in the past, enshrining an air of secrecy about the series to build hype and cover up any potential major twists and cameos that have been there since the first season had to dance around the fact that it was really about a baby Yoda instead of a burgeoning bounty hunter. The show has always heavily leaned on vibes over details, especially when its biggest vibe immediately became a marketable pop culture sensation that you only really have to point at to get people charmed, so it’s unsurprising that the film is no exception.
Instead, however, it’s raising the question if that’s enough for a major motion picture release instead of a new season of a streaming TV show. So far, The Mandalorian and Grogu hasn’t really made a case for why this story is a movie and not a fourth season of the show—despite suggestions that a season four could still exist in some capacity—an issue compounded even further given Lucasfilm’s back-and-forth plans over the past few years of trying to figure out what Star Wars‘ cinematic future looked like in a post-Rise of Skywalker world.
Sure, you can point at the Mandalorian and Grogu, and people know what they are. But is that going to be enough to get them to go to the box office in droves, after years of being taught that these are the stars of Star Wars on the small screen? We’ll find out in three months, when The Mandalorian and Grogu hits theaters on May 22.
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