Fans Saw the First 25 Minutes of Mandalorian & Grogu And They Say It’s the Best Star Wars in Years
On Star Wars Day, May 4, Lucasfilm held IMAX fan events at select theaters across the country. Attendees watched the first 25 to 30 minutes of The Mandalorian & Grogu. At the Los Angeles screening, Lucasfilm president Dave Filoni was there to greet the crowd. At AMC Lincoln Square in New York, an armored Mandalorian and a puppet Grogu showed up alongside the footage.
What came out of those screenings was not what the tracking numbers would have suggested.
Star Wars Holocron, one of the larger fan accounts covering the franchise, posted immediately after: “We just watched the first 25 minutes of THE MANDALORIAN AND GROGU in IMAX and are blown away by what we saw. Cinematic, epic scale that demands to be seen on the big screen. Ludwig Göransson’s music gave us goosebumps. Had smiles on our faces the entire time watching the footage.”
Kyle Selby, another attendee: “I’m very happy to report that this movie hits the ground RUNNING! Fantastic action and adorable Grogu shenanigans. I can’t wait to see the rest!”
@BushidoProds: “The 25 minutes felt like a first episode of a new season. It’s also great to see Mando kicking ass on an IMAX screen. If you’re only gonna see it once in theaters, do IMAX. Sound and scope of the opening action sequence was great. Ludwig’s score is on fire.”
The HoloFiles, which covers Star Wars specifically and attended the Los Angeles event, published a detailed reaction: “To most fitting word to sum up what we saw of The Mandalorian and Grogu on May the 4th is ‘cinematic.’ The more pointed concern — that this would feel like a streaming show on a bigger screen — is not what we experienced. It felt like we were watching the beginning of an epic, sprawling, old-school adventure movie akin to Raiders of the Lost Ark.”
There’s been other reports online before this, however, that state that this feels more like a Netflix movie than a theatrical film.
They described the opening specifically: a Daredevil-esque hallway fight, Din Djarin operating from shadows like Batman, and then Mando and Grogu taking down three massive AT-ATs together. The footage moves through Nal Hutta, a confrontation with the Hutt Twins from The Book of Boba Fett, and a journey to a planet styled after Prohibition-era Chicago before ending on Rotta the Hutt, voiced by Jeremy Allen White, kicking out of a gladiator arena. The Clone Wars movie gets a crowd-pleasing nod. Martin Scorsese voices the name Rotta. The aspect ratio expands to the full 1.43 IMAX frame during the action sequences.
Not every reaction was unconditional. One attendee who writes under the name A Complicated Profession noted the structure felt video-gamey, and called Din Djarin an “extremely inactive protagonist” in the footage seen. The same writer said the action was the best thing in the footage and that they were “enthusiastic about the potential.” Another account, @tylerdisney12, said “something felt off when the opening credits rolled — it didn’t quite feel like a Star Wars movie. It came across more like a streaming TV film than a big-screen experience.” The same person said they would still be in their seat on May 22.
The consistent qualifiers from even the positive reactions are worth noting. Cosmic Book News, which aggregated the reactions, flagged that the attendees were “likely the more hardcore type of Star Wars fans” and that Disney is savvy about who gets invited to these events — pointing out that the first fan reactions to the widely panned 2025 live-action Snow White were also enthusiastic.
Fan screenings at Disney events are not a random sample like one might think. The people in those chairs already love these characters and want this film to be good. What they saw was the first 25 minutes of a film that won’t show critics the full cut for another two weeks. The enthusiasm should be read as directionally meaningful, not definitive.
What it does suggest is that the film’s floor may be higher than the tracking data indicates. The tracking currently projects the film below Solo’s $84 million opening, the worst live-action Star Wars opening under Disney. The film opens May 22. If the word-of-mouth from the first 25 minutes is predictive of anything, the conversation is going to shift in the next two weeks.
What Ludwig Göransson does with Star Wars is apparently doing something to people that the trailers didn’t convey. That detail keeps surfacing across every reaction independently.
Does the fan screening reaction change your outlook on seeing Mandalorian & Grogu in theaters?
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