It feels like a Jedi mind trick to think about it, but The Mandalorian was actually one of the first new TV shows you could watch with a Disney+ subscription when the platform was launched in 2019. Since then, we’ve seen all sorts of other original shows from a galaxy far, far away, with more being announced all the time. So, why is The Mandalorian moving to the big screen for its next adventure?
Earlier this month, CinemaBlend and a handful of other press outlets had the chance to learn more about The Mandalorian & Grogu movie from director Jon Favreau on what’s left of the Los Angeles sets after seeing the first 18 minutes of the movie. Here’s what the filmmaker said when asked about why he decided to make the next installment of The Mandalorian into a movie rather than going with Season 4, which was well underway before the pivot was announced:
I think passion and excitement is something that people feel. And, having a two-hour format completely reframes [things], cause we were getting ready to do Season 4. And, that's different because that's like, ‘Oh, people have seen everything up to this point. Where do [we] go from here?’
The Mandalorian & Grogu now serves as the first theatrical Star Wars movie since Rise of Skywalker back in 2019. Favreau communicated his interest in recapturing “the feeling” he had when he first saw Star Wars back in 1977. And, there are some things that the team on the TV show just couldn’t achieve at the pace of a TV show, that he was excited about exploring with an IMAX release. As he also shared:
This is like Season 1, Episode 1, where it's like, somebody might have seen everything with Star Wars and you gotta make it good for them 'cause those are your people. That's you. That's me. But you also wanna always have an outstretched hand to somebody new who may not have done it and seen it before. You don't want to be exclusionary for that 'cause you want to bring the next generation in. And, hopefully you could speak to both here in our format… So I think the form informed the story more than the story informed the form.
Another inspiration? There’s now a whole new generation of kids who literally weren’t old enough to watch a Star Wars movie in theaters yet! The Mandalorian & Grogu will be their first experience, and Jon Favreau wants to make that special. He also said this:
It's like 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. But, it's also a new challenge. We haven't had this challenge since the beginning of Season 1 where people weren't seeing Star Wars on Disney Plus. 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?
The Mandalorian & Grogu production designer was also on hand at the Los Angeles sets that day to tell us that making a movie rather than a TV show allowed the team to move into “massive stages” they couldn’t before. Since the series moves at a faster pace, they wouldn’t have time to create the kind of sets they did on this feature, which he said sometimes took two to three months.
So, in short, Jon Favreau wanted to make a large-scale Star Wars movie with his established and beloved characters from The Mandalorian. And, can you blame him? We’re talking about the guy who literally helped start the MCU by helming Iron Man in 2008. We’re so curious how The Mandalorian & Grogu will stack up to the TV show and build on the universe when it comes out on May 22.
