The Mandalorian and Grogu First Reactions Are Split Down the Middle, and the Baby Is Not the Problem

Here is a sentence we did not expect to write in 2026. A 50-foot-tall theatrical Star Wars movie, the first one in seven years, is built around a creature the size of a soup tureen who communicates entirely in coos and ear wiggles. And the people who have seen it cannot agree on whether it is a triumph or a nap.

The first reactions to The Mandalorian and Grogu landed on May 14 and 15, ahead of the film’s May 22 theatrical release, and they read like two different movies got reviewed by accident. One camp called it “a thrilling adventure” and “a perfect summer movie.” Another camp called it “one of the weakest Star Wars movies” and, our personal favorite phrase, “kinda a snooze fest.” Both groups watched the same 25 minutes. Both groups are convinced they are right.

The marketing problem nobody at Lucasfilm wants to say out loud

Here is the quiet tension running underneath this whole release. Disney built a global advertising campaign around a baby. Grogu is, commercially speaking, the most valuable small green object since the avocado. He sells plush toys, lunchboxes, phone grips, and an unholy quantity of Build-A-Bear merchandise. He is the reason your aunt who has never seen a Star Wars film knows the phrase “Baby Yoda.”

But cuteness and cinema are not the same currency. A creature that works beautifully as a streaming companion, popping up for a 35-minute episode every Friday, now has to carry a two-hour theatrical story. The early reactions suggest that gap is exactly where the film wobbles. One reporter said it was “an emotionless, predictable experience that doesn’t push Din Djarin anywhere interesting.” Translation: the baby is adorable, the plot is a hallway. We have written before about how internet culture turns small creatures into mascots faster than anyone can plan for, and Grogu is the franchise version of that exact phenomenon.

Jeremy Allen White is a gladiator Hutt and we need to sit with that

Let us pause on a casting decision that deserves a moment of silence. Jeremy Allen White, the man who spent three seasons sweating over a Chicago beef sandwich in The Bear, voices Rotta the Hutt in this film. A gladiator Hutt. A slug who fights for sport.

Collider’s Peri Nemiroff flagged it directly, noting that “live action Hutts are a challenge to pull off, a gladiator Hutt even more so,” and that Rotta’s dialogue was “often too on the nose.” We are not film critics, we are a cat. But we have strong opinions about whether a giant slug should be doing combat sports, and the opinion is: yes, absolutely, more of this please. The Hutt who works out is the most interesting idea in the entire trailer cycle, and apparently the script gave him lines that land with the grace of a brick.

It is a strange pattern. A movie packed with genuinely odd swings, a gladiator slug, an ’80s synth-horror score, a feral chase structure, is being described by half the room as “predictable.” How do you make a gladiator Hutt boring? That takes a specific kind of effort.

The one thing everyone agrees on

Through all the disagreement, one element pulled unanimous praise: Ludwig Göransson’s score. Fandango’s Erik Davis singled out “the parts that felt like an homage to ’80s synth-driven horror and action thrillers.” Other viewers at the IMAX previews reported actual goosebumps. When the snooze-fest people and the thrilling-adventure people both stop to compliment the music, the music is doing something real.

That tracks with everything Göransson has done. The man turns franchises into mood. If you have ever fallen down a rabbit hole of music that sounds like an empty hallway at 3am, you already understand the appeal of a Star Wars score that borrows from synth horror. It is a galaxy far, far away scored like a haunted shopping mall, and we mean that as the highest compliment available to a cat.

The box office is doing something quietly nervous

Numbers tell their own story. As of May 11, tracking has The Mandalorian and Grogu opening to roughly $86.5 million over the four-day Memorial Day weekend in the US, with a projected domestic total around $215 million. That sounds enormous. It is, by any normal standard.

But context bites. That opening is tracking close to Solo: A Star Wars Story, the 2018 film widely treated as the franchise’s box office cautionary tale. For the first Star Wars movie in seven years, riding the single most marketable character Disney owns, “doing Solo numbers” is not the headline anyone in Burbank wanted. The early Rotten Tomatoes prediction sits around 75 percent, above Solo’s 69 but well under Rogue One’s 84.

The review embargo lifts May 19, three days before release, so the full critical picture is still loading. The divided first reactions are the appetizer, not the meal. This same pattern of audiences and critics splitting hard on a big release has been playing out all spring, and we covered a sharper version of it when Mortal Kombat II opened to a wide gap between crowd love and critic shrugs.

The cat’s honest take

Here is our theory, offered from a sunny windowsill. The Mandalorian and Grogu is not failing. It is colliding with an expectation problem. Grogu spent five years being the internet’s perfect small creature. He is the gold standard of “thing too cute to function.” A movie cannot beat that. A movie can only either match the feeling or fall slightly short of it, and “slightly short of perfect cuteness” reads, on a giant screen, as “fine.”

We respect that, because we run a similar operation. A cat is also, fundamentally, a creature that is more compelling in a 35-second clip than in a feature-length narrative. Nobody wants a two-hour movie about us knocking one specific cup off one specific table. They want the clip. Grogu’s problem is our problem, scaled up to a Disney budget.

So will it be good? We genuinely do not know yet, and anyone telling you for certain before May 19 is guessing. But a movie with a workout-obsessed slug, a synth-horror score, and a baby who has personally funded three theme park gift shops is, at minimum, not boring on paper. If it manages to be boring in practice, that will be the most fascinating Star Wars story of the year. We will be watching, ears forward, judging quietly.