May 22nd a new Star Wars movie will hit the cinema’s. It will be 50 years since the original Star Wars that triggered all that was to come. “The Mandalorian and Grogu” enters the cinema at a huge anniversary for Star Wars, and yet at a moment that is also weirdly muted. Does the trailer tell us anything about whether we are dealing with a fresh beginning, or more of the same?

Where is Star Wars now, February 2026?

Star Wars is in a strange and ambiguous place at the moment. It is not a time of fierce fan-infighting, like we saw following the release of Episode VIII: The Last Jedi unabated till Episode IX: The Rise of Skywalker disappeared from cinema’s. Although the fan community is still pretty divided over the Sequel Trilogy, the fanatic urgency has disappeared from most corners of the fandom. “It is what it is” probably sums it up. Not that the Star Wars fandom has remained calm without controversies in the past 7 years since TROS.

As Lucasfilm veered away from cinema and towards television and streaming, some of the vitriol that was so widely available after the end of the Sequel Trilogy remained, erupting irregularly but unmissably during the airing of Star Wars: The Acolyte. The series was awaited with a lot of anticipation, but was met in 2024 with as much enthusiasm

by some, as it was received with rejection and culture-war viciousness by others. A bit of that had already surfaced during the airing in 2022 of Star Wars: Kenobi, which was roughly around the time that I started wholesale blocking certain YouTube channels because they did (and many still do) nothing but grift on spreading hatred. There isn’t a single amongst them that managed to rise above the level of toxically bickering entitled pubescent teens. Neither of the shows were ‘bad television’, even when both had their good and bad moments. I loved the freshness of Acolyte, and I loved the Kenobi-Anakin, and the Kenobi-Leia dynamic of Kenobi. But there was little room for that online, a world where the loudest voices get the algorithmic accolades.

In 2016, at Celebration London, the mood had been different. Episode VII: The Force Awakens had a huge box office success even though the film is in many respects an Episode IV: A New Hope derivative and has (in my view) not added much memorable material to the Episodic universe. But 2016 was also the year of looking ahead at Star Wars: Rogue One (can people please stop calling it Rouge One?), which I thought an excellent, original, and trilling entry into the Star Wars cinematic catalogue. It was also the Celebration with the Thrawn reveal for Season 3 of Star Wars: Rebels.

By that time Rebels had become a solid follow-up of the groundbreaking Star Wars: The Clone Wars that had followed the Prequel Trilogy. Interestingly the during much of the early 2020’s these were the currents from which most of the more successful streaming-outputs came. Of course Star Wars: The Mandalorian was a success in its early seasons as it slowly tied into a post-Episode VI: Return of the Jedi narrative flowing from Rebels, which had ended in its 4th and final season in 2018. Out of this narrative also came 2023’s Star Wars: Ahsoka‘s first season, sometimes not entirely inappropriately referred to as Rebels season 5. With the final, final Season of Clone Wars also airing in those years, and the two seasons of Star Wars: The Bad Batch, there was actually a surprisingly coherent story being told. Something which I don’t think is necessarily appreciated enough, taken for granted, among fans. Though outside the Filoni-verse, for me the spin-off of two outstanding seasons of Star Wars: Andor from Rogue One, fits neatly into picture. Let’s not forget that Rebels, Rogue One, The Bad Batch, and Andor all play in the interval between Episode III: Revenge of the Sith and Episode IV: A New Hope. All with rather direct connections to the post-Episode VI stories in Ahsoka and The Mandalorian. If Star Wars fans weren’t so keen on dividing shows in either ‘garbage’ or ‘best ever’, one could conclude that now, in 2026, Star Wars has a very solid set of story-lines firmly rooted in Prequels and Originals, that can make for some exciting things to come!

Are we closing the Filoni-verse?

Now the trailer of “The Mandalorian and Grogu” is here, after we have had some teasers earlier in the year. I watched the trailer a few times and I am looking forward to this film, definitely something I want to see in IMAX. I have always enjoyed the dynamic between Mando and Grogu, throughout all seasons of The Mandalorian. I absolutely don’t mind seeing more of that in a movie of which the trailer promises it is definitely going to be a fun romp through part of the galaxy.

Seeing Zeb in the trailer was awesome. He had appeared as a cameo in The Mandalorian before, so his inclusion isn’t a complete surprise. He had been remarkably absent from Ahsoka Season 1, and I took him not even being mentioned

as an in-universe hint that the characters involved, Hera, Sabine and Ahsoka, knew where he was and hence it wouldn’t have been necessary for them to discuss it. Any on-screen mentioning of him would have been pointless exposition of a point that didn’t matter to the story of Ahsoka. But we know that Ahsoka Season 1 has ended with both Thrawn and Ezra being back in the Galaxy at the time of the events of The Mandalorian and Grogu.

There is nothing in the 2-minute trailer that suggests the story of the film has any connection to Thrawn’s and Ezra’s return. But it is not hard to imagine a situation in which The Mandalorian & Grogu is one big pillar, with Ahsoka Season 2 being the other, being the fundament on which Filoni’s feature-film, which is in production, would conclude the story-lines developed since the start of Rebels. With Mon Mothma featuring regularly in Ahsoka, and in the knowledge that a significant number of the cast of Andor Season 2 actually survived at least until the Battle of Yavin … it is not overly speculative to imagine a role for characters from Andor in those final acts of these story-threads leading into the Sequel era. Could I imagine Kleya appearing somewhere? By the end of Andor Season 2, Kleya is perhaps in her early twenties? That would put her not much beyond her early to mid thirties during the timeframe of Mandalorian & Grogu. Mon Mothma knows her, and her abilities, and it doesn’t require a lot of imagination to believe that as Supreme Chancellor in the still young and unsettled New Republic, Mon could really use someone like her in her service.

Conclusion

The trailer is short on story and long on exciting adventure. It is short on New Republic entanglements, but long on firmly setting itself in the post-ROTJ story. But Zeb is there, and one should ask whether U-wings land in tropical island-worlds just coincidentally.

I am excited to go and see this movie, ready to be surprised, I don’t know what to expect story-wise, but I know there are a lot of pieces on the board that Favreau and Filoni could play with. And something tells me that, before the end credits roll on Filoni’s film in 3 or so years from now: all those pieces will have been moving.