If Disney and Lucasfilm honestly believe that The Mandalorian and Grogu is the answer to Star Wars‘ future, then they have gravely misunderstood the question. Spun off from the successful Disney+ streaming series, the film feels nothing more than three of its episodes strung together. The epic scale and grand mythology that drove the original film saga is, by this point, almost entirely depleted. Compared to galactic civil war and battle between the Jedi and the Sith, this has all the gravitas of an excursion to the supermarket.

There is a litany of reasons one can point to for an explanation. One is the film’s – and series’ – awkward setting in between the original and sequel trilogies. An audience will always be interested to know what comes next, and might be tempted to learn how things started, but it is the hardest sell of all to interest them in what happened in the middle that clearly did not matter all that much, because no one in the future mentions it. There is a genuinely good premise buried in The Mandalorian and Grogu, in that bounty hunters are searching the galaxy for Imperial war criminals, but it is a premise that would work better employed in a post-Rise of Skywalker future. Here it just feels like filler to sell toys.

The toyetic qualities of the Star Wars franchise have been a factor in its commercial success and critical discussions since the first Kenner action figures rolled into department stores in 1978. There has been a rigorous push-and-pull within the property ever since, and while I have historically sided with the artfulness of Star Wars – that the films themselves drive creativity more than the desire to sell merchandise – there is little escaping that The Mandalorian in streaming and in cinemas is the most cynically and mercenarily composed iteration of the property to date. It used to be that creators Jon Favreau and Dave Filoni would rarely feature a piece of design that was not already featured in another Star Wars film or series. That gave the series – and, it turns out, the film too – the overwhelming sense of watching grown men play with their toys. Now they have taken things further by literally featuring a spaceship that never appeared in Star Wars on-screen – but which was available to purchase as a toy. This is not a film driven by plot or character, but by stuff.

Most oddly of all is the film’s bizarre choice of lead characters, which include a space soldier who rarely removes his helmet, a cute baby variant of Yoda, a fuzzy purple alien from an earlier Dave Filoni cartoon, and a jacked-up muscle-bound Hutt – and if you do not know what a Hutt is, I suspect you are really going to struggle with this movie. There are few human characters on which the audience can attach themselves. Sigourney Weaver turns up in a few scenes, and honestly if she was willing to feature in a Star Wars film they should have cast her as Princess Leia in The Rise of Skywalker and saved everyone from some really awkward editing around the late Carrie Fisher. Quite why she is in this is a mystery: my main guesses are ‘closet nerd’ and ‘gambling debt’. The same applies to Martin Scorsese, delivering a rare vocal performance as an alien that looks like a four-armed Martin Scorsese.

There is absolutely zero character development in the film either. Nobody learns anything. Nobody changes. Nobody is even a little bit interesting – well, maybe the Hutt who quit the gangster lifestyle to become a professional wrestler. To be fair that is quite interesting, but sadly it is also quite peculiarly stupid.

It used to be you would see a film with artificial characters, zero character depth, and garish computer-generated visuals and accuse it of being a videogame. The irony is that over the last quarter century videogames have come to feature complex characters, smart themes, and deeply evocative designs. Now when a game is boring and pointless it is going to have to be compared to The Mandalorian and Grogu.

This might not be the worst film of 2026, but it just might be the laziest – and it is certainly the one least deserving of your money.

The Mandalorian and Grogu is now streaming on Disney+.