The Mandalorian and Grogu Trailer Promises Star Wars Is Returning to its Roots

There’s only one word to describe the first trailer for The Mandalorian and Grogu: fun. We get neon signs reflected in puddles of rain. We get spaceships shooting lasers at one another while racing through clouds. We even get Grogu a.k.a. Baby Yoda dropping a Schwarzenegger-esque one-liner. In short, we get a full embrace of genre fun, which isn’t exactly something we expected for a film spinoff of The Mandalorian.

Sure, The Mandalorian felt both fresh and familiar when it debuted on Disney+ way back in 2019. In the very first scene of the pilot episode, the Mandalorian Din Djarin (voiced by Pedro Pascal and performed by Brendan Wayne and Lateef Crowder) strides into a cantina full of scum and villany to capture a wanted man. Despite the aliens and laser guns involved, the scene feels straight out of a Western, in which John Wayne or some other swaggering law man takes a bandit from a saloon.

Of course, cowboys—along with samurai and fighter pilots and so much more—have always been part of the primordial soup from which George Lucas cooked up Star Wars. But after the world-building of the prequel trilogy and the metatextual expectation defying of The Last Jedi (the last mainline Star Wars film released before The Mandalorian‘s debut), those simple pulp pleasures have diminished.

Over its second and third seasons, The Mandalorian followed in the footsteps of the primary franchise. The show remained mostly about the bounty hunter Din Djarin, who swore to protect the infant Grogu, a member of the same race that spawned Master Yoda. But as Dave Filoni—who has a co-writing credit on The Mandalorian and Grogu, alongside director Jon Favreau—became more of a creative force on the show, the series became more about callbacks to previous shows and movies. We got an AI recreation of Luke Skywalker to fill in some gaps between Return of the Jedi and The Force Awakens. We got Bo-Katan (Katee Sackhoff) from Filoni’s The Clone Wars animated series supplanting Djarin as the de facto lead. We got Jack Black and Lizzo.

In short, The Mandalorian became the exact opposite of what it promised in that first scene. Instead of a back-to-basics celebration of the pulp adventure that made Star Wars a hit, The Mandalorian became a moving Wikipedia entry of references to the franchise.

To be sure, we some referential stuff in the first Mandalorian and Grogu trailer, both in and outside of the universe. It’s hard not to see Sigourney Weaver, dressed in a green jacket and sitting in a dingy sci-fi setting, and not recall Ellen Ripley. And, yes, we do get a look at an Anzellan, the species that includes Rise of Skywalker stand out Babu Frik.

But such winks and nods are minor. Instead, the trailer plays mostly like a celebration of genre pleasures. Set to Ludwig Göransson’s triumphant score, the teaser is full of robots and lasers and fights and force powers—all the stuff that made Star Wars so great.

Will the movie live up to the puply pleasures that the trailer promises? Or is this all a cynical ruse to draw in people who didn’t religiously watch The Clone Wars when they were young? We’ll find out soon.

The Mandalorian and Grogu comes to theaters on May 22, 2026.