We’re fourteen months away from seeing the next Star Wars theatrical release, the Dave Filoni and Jon Favreau produced, The Mandalorian and Grogu, which Favreau has directed. One question some readers have often raised to me is, ‘What’s the budget?’ and today we seem to have an answer.
Thirteen months ago I wrote an article on how much funding The Mandalorian and Grogu would be receiving via California Film and Television Tax Credits program, a healthy $21.7M. I had also shared around the same time via articles and podcasts that the budget would be somewhat similar to the Disney+ Star Wars TV series that were shot and produced in California, at the time the highest budget project was Skeleton Crew at $136M. The latest documents reveal that the production budget for The Mandalorian and Grogu is $166M with the tax credits included, meaning Disney and Lucasfilm spent $144.3M on the flick, pretty close to the budgets of the California based Star Wars series.
The movie is easily the cheapest of the Disney era Star Wars films and if you’re a reader of this site, that would’ve been expected. As I mentioned earlier in the article, this flick was always set to have a similar budget to the California based series and that was part of the appeal of making the movie. The Mandalorian season four scripts were re-shaped into a movie script due to the cost effectiveness of the project, the delays on other planned Star Wars movies – namely New Jedi Order which was initially planned as the first theatrical release post-The Rise of Skywalker, as Disney’s pivot from streaming and back to the big screen.
As part of Disney’s pivot from streaming to the big screen, another project that was morphed from a series into a movie was Moana 2. The Moana series was already very deep into production when the change occurred and though you can see the seams of it in the final product, the movie went on to gross over one billion dollars at the box office. I don’t expect The Mandalorian and Grogu to hit anywhere near those heights, but doing the math and Disney should be happy with anything more than $500M.
Disney decided to make budgets smaller for the streamer and to produce less live-action Star Wars and Marvel series for the service with the focus shifting to the big screen. Disney will be releasing three live-action Marvel series this year, Daredevil: Born Again (which is excellent by the way), Iron Heart and Wonder Man. The reason for the three releases is mostly due to two of them being complete for quite some time (Iron Heart, Wonder Man), but next year we’ll see the reduced output in effect with only two live-action series planned to release, Daredevil: Born Again season two and Vision Quest. Marvel will be releasing three movies in 2026, Avengers: Doomsday, Spider-Man 4 (a co-production with Sony Pictures) and an untitled movie in November 2026.
On the Star Wars front there’s only one live-action series planned for this year and next, Andor season two next month and Ahsoka season two next year. Fans will also get to see The Mandalorian and Grogu on the big screen in May 2026. The next announced live-action Star Wars release will arrive in December 2027 in the form of Shawn Levy’s untitled film that stars Ryan Gosling.
There’s a Mandalorian and Grogu panel set for Star Wars Celebration next month, however it’s unknown if the trailer that’ll be shown at the event will be released publicly given that the films release would be thirteen months away at the time. Disney and Lucasfilm have shown off trailers for the film already at D23 events, but it was exclusively for those in the room.
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