Pedro Pascal says The Mandalorian & Grogu is meant to feel like a true big-screen event, and that is exactly what Lucasfilm is trying to deliver as Star Wars returns to cinemas for the first time in more than six years. The 51-year-old actor, joined by Sigourney Weaver and Jeremy Allen White, appeared with director Jon Favreau at a black carpet event in London for the film, which continues the story of the Disney+ series The Mandalorian.
The film follows bounty hunter Din Djarin and his apprentice Grogu as they try to rescue Jabba the Hutt's son, Rotta the Hutt, and Pascal said audiences had already formed a deep attachment to the pair. He said there were many moments in the film he hoped people would really treasure, adding that one sequence was especially moving and that the project brought back the feeling of going to the cinema as a child. “There are so many imprints in my experience of going to the movie theatre as a kid and growing up going to the movies,” he said. “This film is very touching because of what a thrill ride it is.”
Favreau said moving the story from television to cinemas had given him room to expand the scale in “ways that were not previously possible,” from large sets to fully CGI characters. He said he wanted the film to “introduce new audiences to Star Wars,” and called it “a wonderful experience to do things you could never imagine.” For Favreau, the project is the result of nearly a decade spent working with the characters and the creative team behind The Mandalorian, a run that began after he discovered Star Wars at age 10 and said it “changed my life as it opened my eyes not just to the films but to cinema too.”
The film arrives after years of debate among fans and critics over whether Star Wars has become too dependent on nostalgia and spin-offs, but The Mandalorian & Grogu is built to answer that concern with scale rather than argument. Set in the Star Wars universe after the fall of the Galactic Empire, it is not trying to reboot the franchise so much as carry its most popular recent characters back onto the kind of screen where the saga began. “We let our imaginations fly in a way that hopefully old and new fans will be able to enjoy,” Favreau said, and the real test now is whether the film can do more than satisfy the faithful: whether it can make the return to cinemas feel necessary.
