Star Wars Is Back — Right?

by James Herrera

I woke up this morning to a flurry of text messages blowing up the podcast group chat. Tickets
for Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu were on sale. Right now. As in, had been since
6:00 a.m. PT. No fanfare. No countdown. No “get ready, this is the moment” post across
social media. Just — boom — tickets are on sale, go get them.
I’ll be honest with you. I thought it was going to be later in the day, maybe with some kind of announcement attached to it. But nope. They just quietly went live and moved on. Meanwhile, my co-host Mari — who, in her own words, is either a morning person with a curious mindset or running on pure autism-fueled hyperfocus, possibly both — had already been checking her local theater sites on her own. No group chat needed. Just Mari, quietly staying three steps ahead of everyone else as usual.
And look, I know what this could have been. Because we’ve seen it before. Think back to 2015 when tickets for The Force Awakens went on sale and the demand was so overwhelming that it completely crashed Fandango. That was a moment. The whole internet felt it. People knew it was happening, they were ready for it, and it became an event in itself.
The ticket sale became part of the excitement of the movie. Mari actually got put into a queue
on AMC this morning for less than a minute — and rather than being frustrated, she took it as
a good sign. Proof that the sites had prepared for heavy traffic, even if Lucasfilm hadn’t
exactly announced to the world that today was the day. That’s the kind of enthusiasm this
launch deserved on a much bigger scale.

​Star Wars hasn’t been in theaters in nearly seven years. Seven years! The last time we saw a
Star Wars film on the big screen was The Rise of Skywalker back in 2019. This is not a small
deal. This is a homecoming. So why does it feel like Lucasfilm treated the ticket launch like a
routine Tuesday morning notification?
I get it — maybe they made a deliberate choice not to lean into the chaos of a big pre-sale
countdown. Maybe they learned lessons from the Force Awakens era and wanted something
smoother. But even so, a little hype goes a long way. Throw up a TikTok. Post a reel. Do a
countdown to Friday. Something that tells your audience: “Get your tickets this Friday — this
is the movie event of the summer.” Instead, most people I talked to today had no idea the
tickets were even available.I did manage to snag mine, and I’m genuinely thrilled about where I’ll be seeing it. My wife and I got tickets to the El Capitan Theatre right on Hollywood Boulevard — honestly one of the coolest places in the world to see a Disney or Star Wars film. Mari is just as locked in and just as excited — she’s already buzzing about the exclusive bonus items the El Capitan is offering for the film, and she said it perfectly: she’s feeling “super lucky to live in the land of Disney and movie magic.” That’s the spirit right there. That’s exactly the energy this whole ticket launch should have been met with on a
national scale.
But I’d be lying if I said there wasn’t a little bittersweet feeling mixed in. The fact that two fans
— one checking AMC at the crack of dawn out of sheer curiosity, one being rescued by a
group chat — both ended up locked in for opening weekend says everything. The passion is
there. The audience is ready. Lucasfilm just needs to meet us halfway. Star Wars is back on
the big screen, and I want everyone to feel that. Not just the podcast group chat. Everyone.
Disney, this is your moment — start acting like it.

​A Quick Prediction: The Opening Credits
One thing I’ve been thinking about a lot leading up to this film is something that’s been
reported in the last day or so: The Mandalorian and Grogu will feature an opening credits
sequence — and that is a first for any Star Wars movie. Think about it. In the episodic films,
you get the crawl. In the story films like Solo and Rogue One, the movie just drops you
right in. There’s never been a traditional opening credits roll — until now.
The Mandalorian and Grogu has a bit of a timeline problem when it comes to general audiences. Where does this fit in the Star Wars universe? It’s set after the fall of the Empire, during the rise of the New Republic — the same era as the Disney+ series — but for people who haven’t watched three seasons of
television, that context isn’t obvious. A well-crafted opening title sequence, one that feels
rooted in that classic Star Wars spirit while bridging the gap between the original trilogy and
everything Mando’s world represents, could do a lot of heavy lifting. I’m hopeful that’s exactly what Favreau and the team are going for. Because if general audiences walk in without that context, they might spend the first act confused about when and where they are in the galaxy. The film already opens with some static text (not a crawl, but a written setup explaining where the New Republic stands after the Empire’s fall) — so it seems like there’s awareness of the issue. But the credits sequence could really seal the deal.
The movie is 35 days away. Star Wars is back. Let’s get everyone excited about it --
starting now.