Baby Yoda appeared when Star Wars films still had wide theatrical releases and Disney+ streaming was just beginning to dominate. Over the next six and a half years, Lucasfilm largely stopped delivering blockbuster movies, despite hiring and replacing many high-profile filmmakers. Disney+ live-action Star Wars series achieved mixed results, while film production has been inactive for about a generation. The Mandalorian and Grogu arrives as Lucasfilm’s first film offering in the decade and as the first Star Wars franchise entry to move from streaming to theaters, reversing the usual pattern at the company. The move raises uncertainty about what happens if the film fails and whether Lucasfilm would return to streaming.
"Baby Yoda was a mere 1 month old the last time a Star Wars movie - 2019's widely reviled The Rise of Skywalker - was in wide theatrical release. COVID restrictions hadn't yet thrown moviegoing into a Sarlacc pit. And Disney+'s Boba Fett-adjacent space western The Mandalorian had only recently begun to take hold of the pop-cultural conversation, becoming TV's most-watched streaming series: a Zeitgeist-defining, corporate-ass-saving subscriber magnet for the Mouse House's then-nascent OTT service."
"What a difference six and a half years makes. Over that time, Star Wars'sstudio distributor, Lucasfilm, basically abdicated its original mandate to make blockbuster movies. But not for lack of trying. Lucasfilm's longtime chief executive and brand manager Kathleen Kennedy hired and fired a murderers' row of pedigreed filmmakers - Phil Lord and Chris Miller, Colin Trevorrow, Game of Thrones showrunners D.B. Weiss and David Benioff, and Josh Trank among them - confounding Hollywood and infuriating fans with her seeming one-step-forward, two-steps-back development process."
"While Disney+'s live-action Star Wars streaming series (Obi-Wan Kenobi, , The Book of Boba Fett, The Acolyte, , et al.) have met with varying levels of success, the film part of Lucasfilm's business has been out of commission for a generation. All of which combines to make The Mandalorian and Grogu (in theaters Friday) a vexing thing. The company's first filmic offering this decade and one based on Lucasfilm's most beloved content of the streaming era, it also arrives as the first franchise entry in Star Wars history to make the jump from small to big screen - an inversion of how things at the George Lucas-founded company usually work."
""It makes good sense for them to continue exploiting their most appealing piece of IP," notes an executive at a rival studio. "But if it doesn't work, what's the play then? Go back to streaming?""
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