With only 40 days to go before the release of The Mandalorian and Grogu, the first numbers of box office tracking for the opening weekend have come out.

 

Box Office Theory, the forecasting outlet, predicts a $71M gross for the three-day opening weekend in the U.S. That is the lower they are predicting at least; a paywalled post with more information allegedly says the higher end of the opening gross would be around $85M, according to Twitter.

 

The film bows in theaters on May 22, which is also Memorial Day Weekend in the States, a four-day holiday that is traditionally used by major studios to boost their opening weekend numbers. It’s the same spot where Lucasfilm opened Solo back in 2018 to $84M over three days, and $103M over the four-day period.

 

As it stands, this would be the lowest opening weekend for a Star Wars movie released under the Disney umbrella. Though we must stress that this is still very early, and that other tracking services may offer a different number over the next few weeks, this is certainly not the range that Disney was expecting when they unloaded $166M to make a Star Wars movie and release it at the height of the summer season. While the film is getting a relatively early summer release, it’s set a few weeks before another four-quadrant picture from the same parent company in Toy Story 5, and a few weeks after another fun date movie, also from Disney, in The Devil Wears Prada 2.

 

(L-R) Bai, Clang, Keeto and Grogu in Lucasfilm’s THE MANDALORIAN AND GROGU. Photo courtesy of Lucasfilm. © 2025 Lucasfilm Ltd™. All Rights Reserved.

 

The audiences for both of these movies are still slightly different from that of The Mandalorian and Grogu, of course, and the movie is still fighting an uphill battle to convince people to pay $20 to go see a character they are used to watching in their living room. But cracking an opening weekend in the range of Solo might be concerning in the long run, especially since that movie was the third movie targeted at the same audience in May 2018, coming after an Avengers movie and a Deadpool movie.

 

It’s also unclear what the long-term box office expectations are for this movie. Disney is aware of the dissonance that comes with it, having been previously a successful three-season Disney Plus series. They are going hard with the marketing, playing ads in sports games, and trying to explain to people that this is an IMAX event. But this new report might indicate they still have to do better.

 

New numbers from NRG or Box Office Pro should come out over the next few weeks, but a sub-$100M opening should at least be a headscratcher at the Mouse House. However, it all depends on the buzz and box office legs the film is able to generate after Memorial Day.

 


Miguel Fernández is a Spanish student that has movies as his second passion in life. His favorite movie of all time is The Lord of the Rings, but he is also a huge Star Wars fan. However, fantasy movies are not his only cup of tea, as movies from Scorsese, Fincher, Kubrick or Hitchcock have been an obsession for him since he started to understand the language of filmmaking. He is that guy who will watch a black and white movie, just because it is in black and white.