The State of Star Wars: Does ‘The Mandalorian’s Stumble Signal Big Trouble for Disney+?

There’s a moment in almost every Star Wars story where our beloved heroes face an ambush. What they thought was a clear escape down a trash shoot, a safely hidden Hoth base, or perfectly protected Mandalorian castle is suddenly a killing field. Our heroes have to use their luck, pluck, and the Force to save their skins. Lately, it seems as if Disney+‘s Star Wars television shows have stumbled into their own bit of danger, and are in need of a rescue.

Less than a year ago, Star Wars Celebration 2022 marked something of a victory lap for Lucasfilm and Disney. After years of virtual get-togethers and COVID-delayed productions, fans convened en masse in Anaheim to preview the future of Star Wars and fete their heroes in person. Videos of Mandalorian star Pedro Pascal screaming, “I love you!” to a crowd and prequels anti-hero Hayden Christensen enjoying the glow of a redemptive Obi-Wan Kenobi-centered press tour went viral in fan spaces. When Star Wars fans reunite for Celebration 2023 in London this weekend, the mood might be a little less optimistic. Sure, the fans will likely be thrilled, but the bulletproof facade of Star Wars on Disney+ has since started showing cracks.

While the first two seasons of The Mandalorian were massive critical and commercial successes, Star Wars TV in 2022 was a decidedly mixed bag. The Book of Boba Fett polarized fans and disappointed critics, who gave it a generous 66% score to the audience’s 55% on Rotten Tomatoes. Obi-Wan Kenobi was better received, but didn’t make a massive dint on pop culture. Andor was universally beloved by critics, but rejected by normies, who made it the least watched Star Wars live action show on Disney+ to date.

The Mandalorian Season 3 premiered on March 1, 2023 to a signifcantly subdued reception, especially when compared to Mando Season 2. Series star Pedro Pascal was arguably enjoying more attention for his work on HBO’s The Last of Us, critics dimmed their effusive praise for the series, and industry scuttle was that it was not nabbing the Coruscant skyscraper-high ratings of years past. This, coupled with numerous reports of shelved and scrapped Star Wars features, puts the future of Lucasfilm’s biggest franchise in jeopardy.

So what is the state of Star Wars on Disney+ in 2023? Does The Mandalorian Season 3 mark a massive misstep for the franchise? And what do Star Wars fans really want to see next? And should Disney be nervous about one of its most prized cash cows?

The State of Star Wars on Disney+: Is The Mandalorian Season 3 a Flop?

So is the third season of The Mandalorian officially a flop? Hardly. But the series is showing the show’s first signs of wobbling, both critically and commercially.

The first two seasons of The Mandalorian were beloved by critics and fans alike. In fact, the critical consensus on Rotten Tomatoes is a whopping, certified “Fresh” 93% for both seasons. However, critical acclaim for the series has slipped in Season 3. Critics who screened the first two episodes of the third season of The Mandalorian gave it an average score of 86%. Not bad, but not quite as good as before.

(For additional context, the Rotten Tomatoes score for The Book of Boba Fest is 66%, Obi-Wan Kenobi is 82%, and Andor Season 1 nabbed a franchise high of 96%. Google Trends, meanwhile, shows that search volume for The Mandalorian Season 3 still bests each of the other three Star Wars live-action series, but is down almost 2/3 compared to the peaks of Seasons 1 and 2.)

In the weeks following The Mandalorian Season 3’s premiere, Parrot Analytics Director of Strategy Julia Alexander began sounding a warning alarm in Matthew Belloni’s Puck newsletter. She wrote: “Disney is the king of franchises, but there’s no doubt that disinterest is kicking in. Sure, others would kill for a Star Wars or a Marvel, audience decay be damned. But the numbers for The Mandalorian don’t look good.”

While she admitted that exact figures wouldn’t be released by Nielsen for a few weeks yet, Alexander did assert that “the third season is the least in-demand Mandalorian season, averaging half the demand (66x the average demand of all series in the U.S.) of the first season (125x), according to Parrot Analytics data. That’s additionally validated by SambaTV, which finds a significant drop in viewership compared to the second season.”

When the official Nielsen data dropped last Thursday, it turned out that The Mandalorian Season 3 Episode 1 “The Apostate” was the fifth most-watched streaming show of the week, behind Netflix’s juggernaut hit Outer Banks, Netflix’s latest true crime docuseries Murdaugh Murders: A Southern Scandal, HBO Max’s The Last of Us, and the syndicated CBS show NCIS (streaming on both Netflix and Paramount+).

The good news is The Mandalorian is still the biggest Star Wars show on Disney+. The bad news is it seems more people are streaming NCIS than Baby Yoda’s latest adventure.

So how did The Mandalorian, once a bulletproof, monoculture-consuming hit, slip so far between seasons two and three?

Why Are People Suddenly Souring on Baby Yoda and His Space Friends?

The first two seasons of The Mandalorian premiered to acclaim and enthusiasm. So what happened between Seasons 2 and 3 that could account for the muted response from fans this time around? Well, it could be that Disney+ already squashed all of the hype for Season 3 with The Book of Boba Fett.

As we’ve already noted, The Book of Boba Fett is the weakest of the Star Wars live action series yet. But in addition to bringing the quality of the Star Wars/Disney+ brand down, it also literally messed with fan enthusiasm for The Mandalorian Season 3.

The Mandalorian Season 2 had ended with a digitally-rendered young Luke Skywalker coming to our heroes’ rescue and taking Grogu into his charge, separating Mando from his adoptive son seemingly forever. Grogu would learn the ways of the Force and Din would be free to explore what it meant to be a Mandalorian. The sense was that The Mandalorian Season 3 would eventually reunite the show’s beloved “Lone Wolf and Cub” pairing. The problem was that reunion happened randomly in the middle of The Book of Boba Fett.

ScreenCrush‘s resident Star Wars guru Ryan Arey believes that Disney+ squandered some major storytelling potential there.

“The second season [of The Mandalorian] ended on this incredible cliffhanger — right up there with “Who Shot JR?” on Dallas (or “Who Shot Mr. Burns” on The Simpsons, for you youngsters),” Arey told Decider. “And then — for some reason — that exquisite cliffhanger was resolved in two episodes of a mediocre spinoff show. If Din and Grogu would have begun this season split apart, with their reunion being a bit drawn out, then this would be the highest rated season of the Mandalorian ever.”

Of course, there are other issues plaguing Star Wars’s live action TV slate. In a recent video Arey moderated, ScreenCrush editor-in-chief Matt Singer and IDW Senior Editor Heather Antos both argued that Star Wars’s obsession with Easter eggs means that the shows only cater to super-fans like Arey. He agreed.

“As a fan, I still look forward to waking up early and watching The Mandalorian on Wednesday mornings. Then again, I’m familiar with all of the lore that the show is currently drawing from,” Arey said. “I don’t think that the show has done a great job of introducing casual fans to stories that date back 30 years before the show takes place. The show also doesn’t do a great job of implying a larger story; if you haven’t seen Clone Wars then you really feel like you’re missing something.”

The upshot of all this, though, is good news for Arey and ScreenCrush, who provide detailed explainers for all the Easter eggs mainstream fans miss. While The Mandalorian‘s ratings might be sagging, Arey says ScreenCrush’s YouTube traffic is soaring.

“Our views on the channel ScreenCrush are stronger than ever. Our fan base is loyal to these shows, love them or hate them. Maybe we’re also just better at covering the show than we were four years ago,” he said.

That said, Arey also recognizes that there is a sense of fatigue creeping into the franchise he so loves.

“I will add that every second of Star Wars used to feel special,” he said. “As much as I love covering the shows, every new hour of Star Wars makes the franchise more commonplace. This would have happened if Disney had stayed with their original plan of a Star Wars movie every year, so I guess it was inevitable that Star Wars would become common.” 

But doesn’t Star Wars need to stay special — not common — to stay lucrative for Disney, a company in the throes of major layoffs, restructuring, and financial stresses?

What Does Star Wars’s Stumble Mean for Disney+?

The good news for Disney is that The Mandalorian‘s slight ratings stumble in Season 3 isn’t the end of the world. As Alexander noted in Puck, “the season-over-season decline comes as Disney is getting more conservative with its content investment.”

“If Mandalorian is losing its footing, and Boba Fett failed to perform at the level of Mandalorian’s second season, when does the pullback begin?” Alexander mused, noting that outside of The Mandalorian, Disney’s live action slate is cratering. “Disney+ is practically built around Star Wars fans, so that’s a nasty dilemma to resolve with a possible recession around the corner.”

A layman might immediately point to Marvel as the savior for Disney+’s woes, but that’s another major corporate asset navigating choppy seas. The last MCU feature, Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, was a major box office disappointment, failing to knock James Cameron’s 2022 smash Avatar: The Way of Water off the top yearly spot. (The film is now also tied to grim domestic abuse allegations dogging star Jonathan Majors, whom Marvel was betting on to be the MCU’s next big bad, Kang.) Marvel is also grappling with massive internal disruption as there’s a a brewing legal kerfuffle over longtime executive Victoria Alonso’s recent termination.

Marvel’s not totally down for the count, though. Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 is expected to make mega money this summer and several live action TV projects are in the pipeline for Disney+, including Secret Invasion, Loki Season 2, and Daredevil: Born Again.

That said, Disney+ at least needs to count on the Star Wars universe for that Mando bump. If The Mandalorian alone can’t deliver, what next? What’s the best case scenario for Star Wars going forward?

What’s Next for Star Wars?

No matter the state of The Mandalorian, Disney+ still has a robust slate of Star Wars originals currently in production. There’s the Dave Filoni-produced Ahsoka, starring Rosario Dawson as the eponymous former Jedi and Natasha Liu Bordizzo as Star Wars Rebels character Sabine Wren. That series has been teased to be a live action continuation of Filoni’s fan favorite animated Star Wars shows. So good news for hardcore fans who have already been adoring each and every animation Easter egg in the live action series. But can it connect to casual Star Wars viewers?

Then there’s The Acolyte, from Russian Doll creator Leslye Headland. Set roughly a century before Star Wars: Episode I: The Phantom Menace, the series looks at the dwindling golden age of the Jedi Knights. The show will introduce a cast of new characters played by the likes of Amandla Stenberg, Lee Jung-jae, Manny Jacinto, Dafne Keen, Jodie Turner-Smith, Rebecca Henderson, Charlie Barnett, Dean-Charles Chapman, and Carrie-Anne Moss. That pedigree speaks to a project with the same kind of prestige potential as Andor. Good for the franchise’s critical reputation, but perhaps not catnip for the masses.

But the Star Wars show with perhaps the most mystery surrounding it is Star Wars: Skeleton Crew. Set around the same time as The Mandalorian, the show will have a decidedly more PG edge. All we know is Jude Law stars in it and it’s a coming-of-age story in the vein of The Goonies. The good news is recent Oscar winners The Daniels have been confirmed as directors on one episode. The bad news is that the Everything Everywhere All At Once auteurs have already sort of distanced themselves creatively from the project, claiming they did it to keep their health insurance. A crowd-pleasing show aimed at younger viewers could be what the franchise needs, but the Daniels’s clarifications over their involvement hints that nabbing a Star Wars project isn’t the cool move for hot directors in 2023.

We’ll learn more about the future of Star Wars this weekend when Lucasfilm drops a series of big announcements at Celebration 2023. Perhaps we’ll finally learn if the long-gesticulating Lando series starring Donald Glover is still happening or if Rian Johnson still intends to make his own original Star Wars trilogy. It’ll be a time for the studio to celebrate their wins, sidestep their losses, and assuage the nerves of both fans and investors alike.

The investors probably care that Star Wars continues to bolster Disney+ subscriptions and inspire tourists to flock to Disney’s luxury Galactic Starcruiser resort. But what do Star Wars fans really want?

“For Star Wars TV, I want a great episode of Star Wars TV released every week,” Arey told Decider. “But what I want most from Celebration is a movie. Any movie, but preferably Rian Johnson’s trilogy. Star Wars on TV is fun, it supports the larger story, but the heart of the saga is on the big screen.”

The heart of the saga may indeed be on the big screen, but Star Wars’s future now likely depends on its continued performance on Disney+.