Mandalorian

Monday

Alexander Larman

How Disney ruined Star Wars

This week, the new Star Wars picture – the first live action film since 2019’s commercially successful but largely ridiculed Rise of Skywalker – will come out in cinemas. Clunkily entitled The Mandalorian and Grogu, it is a big-screen spin-off of the once-successful and now largely passé Mandalorian series. A lot is riding on its success, and Lucasfilm, now controlled by Dave Filoni, will be very relieved if it is a hit. Unfortunately, audiences don’t seem especially interested. Advance word on it has been mediocre for some time now – the words “feature-length television movie" have been used more than once – and the box office prediction for its opening weekend is currently somewhere between $70 and $85 million.

Thursday

Tom Slater

Gina Carano and the hypocrisy of Hollywood

Godwin’s Law has become a way of life in our polarised political times. Go on social media any given day and you’ll find someone comparing their political opponents to the Nazis. But the case of Gina Carano is the first I can think of in which someone has been fired for suggesting as much. Carano, a former MMA fighter, was one of the stars of The Mandalorian, the hit Star Wars spin-off series on Disney Plus. That was until yesterday, when an Instagram story she posted, in which she seemed to suggest that the plight of conservatives in America had alarming echoes of early Nazi Germany, led to her being sacked from the show and dropped by her agency.