There’s a cheer inside the Los Angeles IMAX theater before the sneak preview of the first 25 minutes of The Mandalorian and Grogu even begins. The Star Wars fans in the audience of this May the Fourth event recognized a special guest’s hat. Dave Filoni, cowboy hat-wearing head of Lucasfilm, has made an appearance, promising the audience that we’re in for “one heck of a ride.”
His comments, introducing the Jon Favreau-directed movie, are brief and not especially unique—it’s the type of boilerplate stuff you would say about an upcoming film—but a phrase like “one heck of a ride” feels extra telling in The Mandalorian and Grogu‘s case. Based on the first 25 minutes, the movie—a big-screen installment of a TV show that’s a spin-off of a film series—does feel a lot like a ride. A Disneyland-style adventure that captures the vibe of a lot of familiar sights and strings them together into a zippy experience.
This early sequence, the same footage that Disney premiered at CinemaCon in April, begins not with a classic Star Wars text crawl but with static yellow text explaining how Mando (Pedro Pascal, though you don’t see under his helmet yet) and Grogu (a.k.a. Baby Yoda) are bounty hunting on behalf of the New Republic, hunting down Imperial Warlords. The action begins around a table as one of these Imperial remnants laments that things were “better under the Empire” before shaking down the townships under his protection for more money. It’s not the nuanced boardroom scenes that Andor had in spades; it’s an amusing introduction of an old-school first-act baddie who we know Mando’s gonna eliminate before the title card.
Mando does indeed eliminate them, fighting his way through the snowy mountain hideout and then taking down three AT-ATs as they attempt to escape down a narrow mountain pass—a sci-fi version of an even more ill-advised Hannibal crossing the Alps with his elephants. It’s arguably the most we’ve seen the iconic walkers in action in all of Star Wars, as Mando and Grogo dodge their giant feet, jetpack into the cargo hold to eliminate troopers inside, and get behind the controls themselves to shoot the fleeing Imperial warlord’s escape ship out of the sky just before the whole AT-AT blows up. Yet despite the action, this AT-AT appearance doesn’t match the mood of the Hoth battle in The Empire Strikes Back or even the end of Rogue One, where they’re hulking monsters looming over the Scarif battlefield. In The Mandalorian and Grogu, the AT-AT’s are a jungle gym where Mando can show off his stuff for the cold open.
Part of the opening action of The Mandalorian and Grogu takes place on snowy terrain.
Lucasfilm
Mando cuts through these troopers with ease in a way that almost brings to mind Darth Vader’s chilling rampage at the end of Rogue One, though a big part of the power of that scene came from the terrified Rebels as they tried and mostly failed to escape this monster. Here, it’s a masked hero defeating masked villains—action that’s exciting to watch but doesn’t exactly have a ton of stakes.
Maybe that’s just because the real stakes are about to come, and this is just the cold open. That’s a term that originated on the small screen, referring to an attention-grabbing sequence that comes before the opening titles. (James Bond movies made these pre-title sequences into an art form in the 1960s.)
For many, that’s really The Mandalorian and Grogu‘s biggest hurdle: is this the first Star Wars movie in seven years, or is it a supersized episode of a TV show on the biggest screen? And does that distinction matter?
Colonel Ward (Sigourney Weaver) is Mando’s new boss in The Mandalorian and Grogu.
Lucasfilm
After the opening credits, Mando, Grogu, and Zeb return to a rebel base as the sun rises over an alien ocean, and it feels like a certain airplane movie starring Tom Cruise.
Sigourney Weaver’s New Colonel Ward gives Mando a new mission (and a shiny new ST-70 assault ship to replace the Razor Crest), which could scan like another “episode of the week.” But this is the legendary Sigourney Weaver here. Is a TV show when you have Amy Sedaris as a guest star, and a movie is when you get Weaver? Time will tell,
Mando’s mission is to find an Imperial Warlord known as Coin, but the New Republic doesn’t know much more than that. The Hutts might, however, so Mando begrudgingly heads to a Hutt hive where he’s tasked with rescuing Rotta the Hutt, the late Jabba the Hutt’s son. Rotta was last seen by fans as a baby nicknamed Stinky in debut 2008 The Clone Wars movie, but was last seen in-fiction on a world called Shakari, which looks like Prohibition-era Chicago.
Here, Mando asks a four-armed street vendor voiced by Martin Scorsese for information. This scene was previewed in the trailers, but the trailers lied to us! Scorsese’s character, Hugo, doesn’t slam the door on Mando but tells him that everyone knows Rotta. He’s a champion gladiator, apparently, and the sneak preview footage ends with the sight of an extremely buff Hutt finishing his human opponent by shattering a trident and then just body slamming him.
Rotta the Hutt in The Mandalorian and Grogu.
Lucasfilm
The knee-jerk (and understandable) comparisons to the TV show are heightened by the fact that this 25-minute preview is roughly the length of an episode of a half-hour television show, though admittedly, The Mandalorian’s best installments were generally longer.
So, in many ways, these 25 minutes feel like an exciting premiere of a big streaming TV series, one that provides some big setpieces and tees up an exciting season of adventures. The Mandalorian and Grogu is on the big screen—on IMAX, no less, the biggest screens! That gives everything an extra sense of importance, scale, and excitement. This might not be a return to a Star Wars movie from the old days, but the scale is certainly there.
That’s where Filoni’s comment about “the ultimate ride” makes perfect sense. The Mandalorian and Grogu is giving fans a lot of what they’ve seen before, either on the TV show or, as with the AT-ATs and Hutts, a version of them in the movies. But is that a bad thing?
At least based on these first 25 minutes, it seems like The Mandalorian and Grogu is trying to be more than a TV show, though it’s unclear if its ambtious enough to seem on par with the episodic films. It’s a ride for Star Wars fans who want to see Mando look cool and Grogu look cute. So far, mission accomplished. Are there more surprises in store?
Maybe. The mere fact that the trailer intentionally lied about the scene with Martin Scorsese’s funny alien could be a hint at greater surprises to come. So far, Mando and Grogu is exactly what it claims to be. The question is, if the trailers can lie about a funny alien cameo, what else are the trailers hiding?
The Mandalorian and Grogu hits theaters on May 22, 2026.
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