STAR WARS: THE MANDALORIAN & GROGU - Super Bowl Ad Disaster

[AndyDursin]

Looks like a "best of" reel from the series, in feature form...

[Monterey Jack]

Kinda like the old-school poster, though...

[AndyDursin]

Would be an amazing occurrence if this was just like the first few seasons of this show, which were unpretentious and just trying to entertain. What a concept! :

Still it looks like a "Best Of" reel from the series and not an expansion of it per se.

[Monterey Jack]

The shills are out in Force...

[AndyDursin]

Man you've been called out!!

[Monterey Jack]

Man you've been called out!!

It's like aging MCU fans shouting down anyone who DARES to talk smack about the upcoming Doomsday, despite how TERRIBLE the franchise has become for the last five years, and how desperate the (re)casting of RDJ, Chrises Evans and Hemsworth is. The Disney Shill era is getting pushier and more obnoxious by the day.

[AndyDursin]

This Super Bowl ad was so ineffective, I thought it was a beer commercial with Sam Elliott narrating until I realized it was supposed to be for the movie...I think?

Either way, how bad is it? 33,000+ views on Youtube and barely over 1K likes.



Doomcock's right-on analysis:

[Monterey Jack]

The level of erosion in audience interest in Star Wars over the last six years is akin to people no longer wanting to buy popcorn and Coke at the movies. It's fascinating how something that was such a ubiquitous Force in pop culture has been rendered utterly disposable inside of a decade, considering the fervent levels of interest that greeted the earliest The Force Awakens trailers. Disney can deflect by calling us ists and phobes until they're blue in the face, but the real reason no one cares anymore is turning our grand, big-screen CINEMATIC saga into a non-stop grindhouse of mediocre streaming slop, and the series' "triumphant" return to cinemas turns out to be...a movie continuation of a streaming show, one with a third season so poor it completely alienated the core fanbase. It's like that lame second X-Files movie hitting theaters only six years after the original run of the show sputtered out with a terrible last season, and expecting former X-Philes to get excited over something that played like an especially lame "Monster Of The Week" episode from the last few seasons of the show.

[Monterey Jack]

"MCU movies are nothing but empty roller-coaster rides, not actual cinema...!"

[Monterey Jack]

A Disney production needing frantic, no-doubt expensive last-minute reshoots...it must be a day ending in "Y".

[AndyDursin]

This show had its last season conclude 3 years ago and peaked in popularity before then -- and Doomcock's summary wraps up how inferior and disposable the last couple of seasons were. It's not as if the series ended on some kind of thrilling cliffhanger anybody is excited to see play out (honestly I don't even remember HOW it ended).

Will be really interesting to see what this does at a flailing box-office in 2026. Probably will be lucky to do so SOLO numbers, which once upon a time, was considered a box-office disaster.

[Monterey Jack]

I never even WATCHED the third season, and apparently I got out when the getting was good. "Baby Yoda" mania crested years ago, and every time I see the trailer in theaters there's not a whiff of excitement. And this is what's supposed to be the "triumphant" return to the big screen for Star Wars...a spin-off of a streaming show.

[AndyDursin]

Is that even what this is supposed to be though? Their marketing is some of the worst I've ever seen from a Disney product. It's utterly whatever. The trailers are meh, the Super Bowl spot looked like a beer commercial and confused everyone who watched it.

Usually Disney's marketing is spot on but this looks like a "Very Special Disney+ Episode" and I can't imagine even some crazed fan of the material (and I liked the first few seasons quite a bit) getting gooey about the trailers and marketing campaign.

Admittedly outside of Baby Yoda doing his shenanigans though, what IS there to be excited about?? Hey, instead of doing something smart like bring back Gina Carano's character or something, we've got old SIGOURNEY WEAVER this time --- whoohooo!

[Monterey Jack]

Admittedly outside of Baby Yoda doing his shenanigans though, what IS there to be excited about?? Hey, instead of doing something smart like bring back Gina Carano's character or something, we've got old SIGOURNEY WEAVER this time --- whoohooo!

Bringing Carano back would be Disney admitting they were wrong to fire her in the first place (akin to Melissa Barrera getting axed from the Scream franchise for almost the exact same reason, and Jenna Ortega walking away in solidarity, leading to the current, awful film ), and that would never happen.

As for Weaver...does she need the money that badly at this point? She's a 75-year-old woman playing a 14-year-old Na-vi in the Avatar sequels, but at least there, she's hidden behind a mocap shell. It's like that phrase you used some years ago, "Franchise Incest", where we keep seeing the same two-dozen actors in everything, rather than trying to create some new stars to replace them. We're only two movies deep into the rebooted DCEU, and they've already (re)cast Jason Momoa as Lobo in the forthcoming Supergirl movie. Are we gonna see Gal Gadot as Zatanna? Ben Affleck as Green Lantern? Henry Cavill as Bizarro?

[AndyDursin]

Yeah looks great...