This week, the promotional campaign for The Mandalorian and Grogu kicked into high gear as we began to stare down just weeks until the movie’s release. It mostly did so by releasing a new promo that proverbially pointed a blaster at the head of Pedro Pascal’s Din Djarin and said, “Come see this movie or beskar boy gets it”—but maybe The Mandalorian and Grogu might be interesting if it actually pulled the trigger?
This kind of marketing tactic isn’t unique. The Mandalorian and Grogu is far from the first movie to try and entice audiences to theaters (especially after those box office predictions) by threatening that their faves might not make it through the movie in one piece. But outside of maybe one line in past trailers where Din ruminated on the idea that his long-lived green ward, Grogu, will inevitably outlive him, there had been nothing about what Lucasfilm showed off of The Mandalorian and Grogu up to this point that really threatened one of the titular characters’ mortalities, and especially not so heavy-handedly.
It’s similarly been clear from all the marketing that the movie is at least keeping a lot close to its chest—Lucasfilm and Disney have been keenly insistent in largely showing off material from the film’s opening act, and little more beyond it, as trailers have, in their obfuscation, largely failed to elucidate just what The Mandalorian and Grogu is really about beyond “The Mandalorian and Grogu go on an adventure, and oh damn, Jabba’s swole son is here.” The film could be hiding a major loss on the level of Din’s death, but there’s also a lot you can argue against it happening.
First off, director Jon Favreau has repeatedly described the film as an adventure aimed at families, and it would be kind of messed up to do that and then have poor Grogu orphaned by the end of its runtime (you could argue a parallel to The Force Awakens and Han’s death in that regard, but the thing there was that Han’s death wasn’t orphaning a little kid—or a kid-presenting character, in Grogu’s case). And if you did want to tempt butts into movie theater seats by threatening a character not making it out, Din is the obvious choice among the main cast.
There’s no way Disney would threaten its little green cash cow, not when it can still hawk $600 animatronic toys of them. Sigourney Weaver’s Colonel Ward is an unknown to us as a new character, so you get little out of threatening her life yet, even if it is Sigourney Weaver. And as for Zeb—and I say this with nothing but love and respect for my fellow Rebels fans—he might as well be a new character, at least in the minds of the mainstream moviegoing Star Wars audiences The Mandalorian and Grogu is trying to aim itself at, so again, no point threatening him in an ad spot either.
But even if it seems unlikely The Mandalorian and Grogu might just be and Grogu by the time we walk out of the movie theater, even raising the question in the first place raises the possibility that answering it would maybe be a good thing. Especially as, if we’re honest, The Mandalorian has by and large struggled with what it wants to do with The Mandalorian for quite some time.
The Mandalorian as a show spent all three of its seasons brushing up against thread after thread for Din to make his character interesting outside of his growing relationship with Grogu, only for them to either fall along the wayside or even be transposed onto other characters almost entirely. The revelation Bo-Katan gives him that the covert he was raised by came from the ashes of Death Watch leaves the picture almost as quickly as it ended; his decision to remove his helmet to say farewell to Grogu at the end of season two and challenge the covert’s orthodoxy gives way to him spending all of season three deciding that it was actually wrong to do that. His lack of desire to wield what the Darksaber represents after acquiring it from Moff Gideon could’ve been an interesting struggle for Din, but instead the weapon is awkwardly handed off to Bo-Katan to fuel her arc as Mandalore’s returned ruler.
Even Din being a bounty hunter skirting the law and order of the galaxy has been something that has been muddied and lost—but at least that’s been more mixed for his character than bad, thanks to it being in part driven by his desire to care for Grogu. But outside of that familial bond, the more and more The Mandalorian blew up, and the series became increasingly about elevating Din’s position in the galaxy beyond a lonesome wanderer. Din himself has gotten increasingly lost in the process and flattened into an action figure that largely exists to look cool shooting people. And it’s not that that isn’t fun! But it just isn’t a character.
If Din is to have a future in Star Wars beyond The Mandalorian and Grogu, the movie has to take the opportunity it’s been given by thrusting these two characters into the theatrical spotlight to actually find a character arc it can stick to with him, one it doesn’t just discard as quickly as possible whenever we see him next. There’s a ton of potential here: the question of his mortality as part of his relationship with Grogu that’s been touched upon in the trailers is a good example. Having Din think about how Grogu will outlive him, whatever choices he makes—so what that means for how he spends his time in the here and now, with the push and pull of helping the New Republic and becoming a hero against the backdrop of just being there for his child—is fertile ground for the character to explore, even if it might necessarily end up taking Din out of the galactic picture at some point. But it could be anything, related to Grogu or otherwise, as long as it’s something Star Wars is willing to commit to in the long term for the character.
The Mandalorian and Grogu should be a huge opportunity to kind of reset and re-realize who Din and Grogu are now and who they are to each other, putting aside the struggled attempts of the TV show before it. If the film can’t even do that, then it might as well just take Din off of the board permanently—because the way he’s been dragged between arcs that go nowhere and only serve to file away every bit of potential in his character, can we even say he’s really living in the first place?
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