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- Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu opened to $98M domestic over the four-day Memorial Day weekend — the lowest opening in Star Wars theatrical history, below Solo‘s $103M in 2018
- Disney had projected $102M; worldwide gross reached $167M, nearly covering the $165M production budget in its first frame
- A24’s Backrooms pushed hard for No. 1, with a $40M+ debut that would rank as the studio’s highest-grossing opening ever
- Audiences on Rotten Tomatoes called it “a perfectly enjoyable low-stakes popcorn movie” — families, not franchise obsessives, drove the turnout
- The film stars Pedro Pascal as Din Djarin, with Jeremy Allen White and Sigourney Weaver in supporting roles, directed by Jon Favreau
The first Star Wars movie in seven years won the Memorial Day box office. It also posted the lowest opening in Star Wars theatrical history. Both things are true, and depending on who you ask, that’s either a crisis or exactly what Disney expected.
The final numbers for Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu came in at $98 million domestic for the four-day holiday weekend — $81 million for the traditional three-day — with a worldwide total of $167 million. Disney had projected a four-day domestic figure of $102 million on Sunday, revised slightly to $100 million by Monday evening. The actuals came in softer still.
The comparison that keeps surfacing is Solo: A Star Wars Story, which opened over Memorial Day 2018 to $103 million domestically and is widely remembered as the franchise’s most significant box office stumble. The Mandalorian and Grogu fell short of that. In terms of raw opening weekend numbers, it is now the worst-performing Star Wars film in the franchise’s theatrical history.
The Case for Not Panicking
The production budget was $165 million — modest by current blockbuster standards. The film covered it globally in its opening weekend, before accounting for marketing costs. That’s not a bomb. It’s also not the sequel trilogy, which was chasing different demographics entirely.
IndieWire made the most useful observation: “Families, Not Fanboys, Drove The Mandalorian and Grogu Box Office — and Disney Is Fine with That.” The film was never engineered for the Reddit-and-YouTube corner of the fanbase that dissected The Last Jedi frame by frame. It’s a family adventure about a space dad and his small green son, and families showed up for it.
Audience scores on Rotten Tomatoes reinforced that read. The consensus from viewers called it “a perfectly enjoyable low-stakes popcorn movie” that delivered on the relationship between Din Djarin and Grogu and “exciting action set pieces.” Nobody walked out angry. Nobody is writing think-pieces about betrayal.
Comicbook.com pushed back on the broader narrative, arguing that “what everyone is getting wrong about the box office” is the comparison itself — that The Mandalorian and Grogu was never competing against The Force Awakens or The Last Jedi. Those films drew audiences who grew up with the original trilogy and were hungry for a return. This film drew people who watch The Mandalorian on Disney+ and wanted to see it bigger. Those are different audiences with different behavior patterns.
The Backrooms Factor
The weekend’s other major story was A24’s Backrooms, the adaptation of internet horror creator Kane Parsons’ YouTube IP, which opened with an estimated $40 million or more — a figure that would represent the highest opening weekend in A24’s history. That a sub-$10 million horror film from a first-time narrative director effectively challenged a Star Wars movie at the Memorial Day box office is its own kind of story, and one that studios are going to be studying for a while.
Backrooms had the same weekend that The Mandalorian and Grogu was supposed to own. The fact that it didn’t is part of why the post-weekend discourse has been so loud.
What Comes Next
Jon Favreau directed and produced the film, with Pedro Pascal returning as Din Djarin alongside Jeremy Allen White and Sigourney Weaver. The film’s global run is just beginning — international markets will matter considerably for how the final numbers look by the time it leaves theaters.
The Ringer framed the weekend with the starkest possible take: “The Mandalorian and Grogu Is the End of Star Wars as We Know It.” Their podcast brought in Star Wars superfan Van Lathan to discuss who the movie was actually made for and whether it marks an end of an era for the franchise at large. It’s a reasonable question, even if the answer isn’t as clean as the headline suggests.
Star Wars last opened a movie in theaters in December 2019. Seven years later, the franchise came back with a family film that opened below expectations and still made its budget back in four days. Whether that’s a failure, a pivot, or just the new reality of a franchise that peaked a decade ago probably depends on how much you loved the sequel trilogy — and whether you have a kid who cried when Grogu showed up on the big screen.
