Film Review

The Mandalorian and Grogu:
This is the Way

| published October 8, 2026 |

By Sandi Jerome,
Thursday Review contributor

"The old protect the young, then the young protect the old. This is the Way." That line, delivered while Mando patiently hands Grogu a few berries, is the moment The Mandalorian and Grogu won me over. It is quiet, it is small, and it carries the whole movie on the creature's tiny green shoulders. In a franchise famous for exploding Death Stars, the scene I keep thinking about is a man feeding a child.

Jon Favreau directed the film and co-wrote it with Dave Filoni and Noah Kloor, who wrote all seven episodes of The Book of Boba Fett with Favreau. Pedro Pascal returns as the Mandalorian (Din Djarin), with Sigourney Weaver, Jeremy Allen White as Rotta the Hutt, and, believe it or not, Martin Scorsese flipping burgers in a food truck! Listen for his voice, because you won't recognize him any other way.

The film closed at $345.5 million worldwide, the lowest total for any live-action Star Wars film, but when it hit Disney+ on September 2, it jumped straight to number one. Grogu, it turns out, prefers to be watched from home. This movie was never supposed to be a movie. Favreau pitched a Mandalorian series to Kathleen Kennedy while making The Lion King in 2017, and Filoni had been dreaming up the same idea. By February 2023 the pair had written a fourth season of the popular series. Then the 2023 Hollywood strikes shut everything down, and Lucasfilm used the pause to rethink. The season became a feature. Large chunks of the $165 million budget were for shooting in IMAX format.

I recently binged every Star Wars film while watching Light & Magic, the Disney+ documentary about the FX firm, Industrial Light & Magic. It is a love letter to the model shop, the garage full of misfits who glued together X-wings and blew up miniature Death Stars, starting in the 1970s. As Thursday Review noted in its 50th-anniversary look at 2001: A Space Odyssey, Kubrick's 1968 masterpiece changed our world with models, front projection, and sheer patience. Lucas took that torch and lit the galaxy. Then came Jurassic Park in 1993, the dinosaurs went digital, and the model makers watched their craft go extinct right alongside the T. rex.

The Mandalorian sits at a fascinating crossroads. Favreau's "Volume," a stage wrapped in giant LED screens, replaced green screens with digital worlds the actors can actually see. Yet the star of the show is a puppet! Grogu is still brought to life with animatronics and puppetry, finished with visual effects, and that tactile little guy is why I melted over a handful of berries. It is the same lesson Thursday Review editor R. Alan Clanton drew from The Martian in 2015: audiences connect with what feels real. Watney's potatoes felt real. So does Grogu's appetite. But CGI, and now AI, is taking over the industry. As a former CPA, I know the math. Movies are horribly expensive, the risk is enormous, and that is why so few get made. If CGI and AI can lower the cost, we could get more stories for less money. Whether that is a new hope or a phantom menace depends on whether the humans stay in the loop.

I saw the same truth earlier this summer in Remarkably Bright Creatures, which I reviewed for Thursday Review in June. Sally Field's Tova Sullivan, a widow hiding her grief behind a rigid routine of nighttime cleaning, forms an unlikely friendship with Marcellus, a giant Pacific octopus voiced by Alfred Molina. She tends to him at the aquarium, and he, using his final days, quietly orchestrates the healing of the humans around him. The caretaker and the cared-for trade places, just like Din and Grogu. That was Tova's "This is the Way" moment, and like this film, it was a three-hankie experience.

The Mandalorian and Grogu won't go down as a box office titan, and its story wanders more than it should, with too many fight scenes, but it knows where its heart is. Kubrick's models protected the young art of science fiction. Lucas's model shop grew up on Kubrick's shoulders, and now the pixels carry them all forward. Every generation of filmmakers stands on the last one, and someday the new tools will have to honor the old craft that raised them. The old protect the young, then the young protect the old. This is the Way.



Sandi Jerome is a screenwriter, author, and former technology company founder whose diverse background as a UCLA Advanced Screenwriting graduate, former CPA, and novelist shapes her insightful analysis of film and book-to-screen adaptations. She is a frequent contributor to Thursday Review.

Related Thursday Review articles:

Remarkably Bright Creatures; film review; Sandi Jerome; Thursday Review; June 2, 2026.

Project Hail Mary: Why Grounded Science Makes for Better Sci-Fi; Sandi Jerome; Thursday Review; June 23, 2026.