The Mandalorian
Disney Plus launched this past Tuesday, and with it came the first episode of The Mandalorian, far and away its “signature” release window show. It debuted to generally pretty positive reviews from Star Wars fans and casual viewers alike, myself included. But while Disney is not dropping all the episodes at the same time for a binge watch like Netflix would, we do have a bonus this week.
There is a new episode of The Mandalorian on Disney Plus as we speak. The show is normally supposed to debut every Friday going forward, and it only showed up on Tuesday because that ended up being the launch day for the entire service.
Episode 2, called Chapter 2: The Child is live as of this morning. I believe Disney is putting these live at midnight ET, so you can stay up late on Thursdays to watch if you want, or just do it over the course of the weekend. Today’s episode is not directed by Dave Filoni who did the premiere, but rather Rick Famuyiwa, who directed 2015’s Dope. Filoni will be back for episode 5, which he also wrote. Jon Favreau wrote today’s episode, along with the pilot and six of the eight total episodes this season, in fact.
Episode 1 ended on a number of cliffhangers, which I will not going into here, but I wouldn’t expect all that many answers by the end of the episode today. I’ll have my thoughts on the episode later on today and you can check back for those in a little while.
The Mandalorian
The Mandalorian is only running for eight weeks total, and it does strike me as a little bit odd that Disney really only has one of its prestige programs ready to go for this launch window. We have zero idea when other big-name Star Wars Disney Plus projects like Obi-Wan will arrive, and over in the Marvel universe, we don’t have any of those shows arriving until fall of next year. That’s a lot of weight to put on the Mandalorian for this debut, and it seems that Disney will mostly be surfing on nostalgia for most of the next year, outside of a few of its non-SW/Marvel new offerings. Also odd is the fact that these episodes are proving to be *really* short. The pilot was about 37 minutes or so while today’s episode? When you cut out the “previously on” scenes and credits, is no more than 27 minutes long.
Disney COO Alan Horn apparently just said if The Mandalorian is a success, a film series could be developed based on the show. I would imagine it’s probably a better idea to simply leave it as a longer running series that fans can come back to year in and year out, and they should focus on the other movies they already have in development. There’s nothing about The Mandalorian that seems like it needs to be a movie, especially with the budget Disney is giving it.
Alright, time to watch. Check back later for my thoughts.
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