Mandalorian and Grogu Tops Box Office With Franchise-Low Open

The Mandalorian and Grogu opened to a franchise-low $33 million Friday but earned the highest audience score of any Star Wars film since Disney took over.

The Mandalorian and Grogu opened to $33 million on Friday, the lowest first-day domestic gross for a Star Wars film since Disney bought Lucasfilm in 2012. The same audiences gave it the franchise’s highest audience score in the Disney era.

The split is the story. Disney has a film that families and kids are loving, that critics are mostly shrugging at, and that opened behind the previous franchise low set by 2018’s Solo, which did $35.4 million on its first day, not adjusted for inflation.

The Hollywood Reporter’s breakdown of the Friday number and the audience-versus-critic gap notes the Rotten Tomatoes audience score sitting at 89 percent, the best of any Star Wars film since the Disney acquisition. The critics’ score is at 62 percent.

The four-day Memorial Day weekend window remains live. Disney is projecting $92 million to $96 million total, with rivals more bullish at $95 million to $100 million. Deadline’s running tracking of the Saturday numbers and the path to a four-day finish has the film on pace to fall just short of Solo’s $103 million four-day opening.

The kid demographic is what’s keeping the film afloat. Kids under 12 gave it 95 percent positive, with 54 percent calling it a must-see right away. Boys under 13 scored it 5 out of 5 on PostTrak.

General audiences settled in around an A- CinemaScore and 4 out of 5 stars, both healthy numbers. The audience is also unusually streaming-native: 68 percent of opening-weekend ticket buyers are Disney+ subscribers, the highest streaming-subscriber share for any title in theaters this year.

The format mix tilted to premium. IMAX and other premium large-format screens accounted for 48 percent of ticket sales on opening day, with IMAX alone pulling 16 percent and 3D another 8 percent. AMC Disney Springs in Orlando led the country at roughly $133,000 in opening-day grosses.

International tracking is fuzzier. Sources have the overseas opening at around $69 million, though Disney has not confirmed. That would put the worldwide opening near $167 million on the high end of forecasts.

Critics, who Rotten Tomatoes summarize as finding the film bountiful in action but threadbare in narrative, have been the noisy minority. The consensus reads the picture as a coast on the Mando-Grogu charm rather than a major creative swing.

The cast remains the version reported earlier. Pedro Pascal returns as the bounty hunter Din Djarin; Sigourney Weaver plays New Republic Colonel Ward; Jeremy Allen White voices Rotta the Hutt; and Martin Scorsese turns up as a four-armed food-stand chef in a brief but talked-about appearance.

Director Jon Favreau wrote the script with Noah Kloor and Dave Filoni. Filoni was elevated earlier this year to Lucasfilm president and chief creative officer following Kathleen Kennedy’s departure, putting him in charge of the franchise’s theatrical future just in time for its first big stress test in seven years.

The merchandise context cushions everything. Star Wars consistently ranks among the top five global toy sellers, with over $1 billion in annual retail sales. Grogu toys alone moved 13 million units in their first two years on shelves.

That ancillary math is the answer to whether the film matters financially. The ticket numbers are one slice. The Grogu plush is the rest.