When The Mandalorian and Grogu hits theaters on May 22, a lot is riding on it. It’s the first Star Wars movie in theaters in seven years. It’s the first time a Star Wars TV show is making the jump from the small screen. And it has to make a difficult choice. Do you tell a story that’s directly related to three seasons of a TV show not all of your audience has seen, or do you tell a story that satisfies those fans as well as the new ones?
Speaking to io9 and other press in Los Angeles last week, the co-writer and director of The Mandalorian and Grogu discussed that question and came to a very interesting conclusion.
“I think it’s a back-and-forth conversation,” Favreau said. “On the one hand, here’s the paint set you have. What could you do with it? So part of it is being inspired by what you have available to you and taking the limitations away from what it was [as a TV show]. But it’s also a new challenge. We haven’t had this challenge since the beginning of season one, where people weren’t seeing Star Wars on Disney+. There were films in the movie theater. How do you engage? How do you connect with the audience in a way that’s meaningful but also something we’re excited about? What do we want to do?
What they did was tell a story that everyone involved was really passionate about, but also one that split the middle, hoping to satisfy fans and non-fans alike.
“Having a two-hour format completely reframes [things],” Favreau continued. “Because we were getting ready to do season four, and that’s different because that’s like, ‘Oh, people have seen everything up to this point. Where do you go from here?’ This is like season one, episode one. Somebody might have seen everything Star Wars, and you gotta make it good for them because those are your people. That’s you. That’s me. But you also want to always have an outstretched hand to somebody new who may not have seen it before. You don’t want to be exclusionary. You want to bring the next generation in, and hopefully you could speak to both. Here? A two-hour format [is a] totally different trajectory and form. So I think the form informed the story more than the story informed the form.”
There’s a lot there, but the main takeaway for us is that last part. Favreau says that the form—aka, a movie on the big screen—informed the story they wanted to tell. So that very much makes it seem as if the idea of bringing The Mandalorian and Grogu to the big screen came before the story they were going to tell. Which, frankly, is a little worrisome. We would’ve loved it if he had a story that was just so big and epic that a movie was necessary. Not the other way around.
Favreau did say, though, that he and the marketing were still holding a lot back. “We already showed you a lot, so I don’t want to open up the Christmas present too much,” he said. “But then we also knew that… if you knew everything, you’re peeking a little early. So there’s a lot to it.”
We’ll see if that’s true or not in a few weeks when The Mandalorian and Grogu hits theaters May 22.
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