This article was published on 5/22 and republished on 5/24.
While The Mandalorian and Grogu has one of the lowest Rotten Tomatoes critic scores in Star Wars history, and the second-lowest of the Disney era, that is not true for its audience scores. At least so far.
In early viewings, The Mandalorian and Grogu is proving to be a crowd-pleaser, racking up an 88% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes. That sets a record as the highest audience score for a Star Wars film in the Disney era, and unsurprisingly, above the prequel trilogy as well. The only movies to beat it, you may guess, are the original three. Here’s the breakdown of the list
- The Empire Strikes Back – 97% audience score, 93% critic score
- A New Hope – 96% audience score, 94% critic score
- Return of the Jedi – 94% audience score, 83% critic score
- The Mandalorian and Grogu – 88% audience score, 61% critic score
- Rogue One (Disney) – 87% audience score, 84% critic score
- Rise of Skywalker (Disney) – 86% audience score, 51% critic score
- The Force Awakens (Disney) – 84% audience score, 93% critic score
- Solo (Disney) – 63% audience score, 69% critic score
- Revenge of the Sith – 66% audience score, 79% critic score
- The Phantom Menace – 59% audience score, 54% critic score
- Attack of the Clones – 56% audience score, 62% critic score
- The Last Jedi (Disney) – 41% audience score, 91% critic score
The caveat here is that the score could change and knock down The Mandalorian and Grogu quite a few places quickly. At an 88%, even a 7% drop would put it below Rogue One, The Force Awakens and Rise of Skywalker. It would then only be above the underperforming (underrated) Solo and the (very much review-bombed) Last Jedi.
Critic reviews mean little when box office is all Disney cares about. Rise of Skywalker was panned, but still made a billion dollars. The opposite can be true as well, where the fan-hate Last Jedi made $1.3 billion. Though The Mandalorian and Grogu does not seem as “must see” as those did.
Box office tracking is somewhere around $80-100 million domestically and $160 globally, the movie having a relatively low $165 million budget. It stands to reason that The Mandalorian and Grogu is neither going to be a massive hit nor an epic failure, and it may just be “good enough” for Disney’s return to Star Wars movies after seven years. Obviously, I think they’d want to arrive with a bang, but given how things have gone, it’s amazing they finally even got a movie out at all. And this could have gone worse, it seems.
Update (5/24): Checking back to see if the score had in fact dropped as more reviews came in, I was surprised to see that the audience score for the movie had actually gone up another point, securing its top spot among the Disney Star Wars entries. This is now with a full 5,000+ reviews in rather than a few hundred, and it’s possible it creeps up to a 90% over the holiday weekend here.
I still have yet to see the film, but I suspect what’s happened here is that by ditching the baggage of the underwhelming season 3 of The Mandalorian and starting at least somewhat fresh, the movie managed to recapture the relatively basic magic of season 1. A bounty-hunting Mando and his little sidekick, without getting deep in the weeds of Star Wars lore pulled from the Clone Wars/Rebels days, which is where things went in season 3. Critics may have grown tired of the schtick here, but audiences have not.
I also think it’s important to realize this is still fundamentally a Jon Favreau movie, where this is a man who has directed pretty much nothing anyone would consider bad or unsuccessful. He did the recent live action Lion King, which made $1.6 billion. He did the amazing small-scale Chef, he did an all-time Christmas Classic, Elf, and he kicked off the MCU with the original Iron Man.
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