The new trailer for The Mandalorian and Grogu has dropped, and I have to confess, I was left cold by it. I didn’t love it; I didn’t hate it. I just watched it with a shrug. It could have been worse or better, but I really don’t care very much about this movie.

This will be the first Star Wars movie for more than six years when it releases next May. It should be some sort of spectacle to really get fans excited for the return to theatres of the biggest franchise ever, but it all feels a bit bland.

I think that The Mandalorian is a terrible choice for the basis of the next film. The show has long since outrun its premise. What began as a Boba Fett show without Boba Fett (I still don’t know why) quickly became about a little green alien with pointy ears and too much screentime.

It’s plot was very much “adventure of the week”, about a bounty hunter taking on jobs, which was fine and seemed a natural choice for the first live-action Star Wars series, but problems began when they tried to branch out more.

It soon becomes clear that Din Djarin isn’t really a character. He’s an action figure, there for the audience to create whatever backstory they want for him. The attempt to give him some development ended in a character circle, rather than an arc.

He spent so much time learning to remove his helmet, throw off the dogma of his Mandalorian sect, and accept Grogu as his own, only to completely retcon all that with season three, where they both return to the place where they began. Grogu should have gone to train with Luke for a whole season at least, but instead we got a couple of terrible episodes tacked onto The Book of Boba Fett to try and resolve everything as quickly as possible.

Like a lot of Dave Filoni projects, there’s something very timid and safe about it. It’s too scared of altering things or killing off characters to take the kind of decisions a good show needs to take in order to stay interesting.

Now we are to get a movie that’s a reworked fourth season. If it had released in 2022 I could have seen it being a success, but now? Season three was a huge disappointment, with a big focus on Bo-Katan and cute Grogu moments (not forgetting Lizzo and Jack Black), rather than any real plot development that could have led up to this movie.

Like most of Star Wars this past decade, there was no real plan in place for where to take the show after season one, so it’s become stuck in a glitch, repeating the same points over and over again.

From what I can see from the teaser trailer and the plot summaries, this looks very much like it will be a couple of episodes of The Mandalorian snipped into a movie. Din is hired to do some job, the New Republic are dumb and struggling, there are Hutts and gangsters, with plenty of action, cameos, and Grogu moments that will make cute GIFs, but nothing of any substance.

My predictions put it at maybe $500M gross. If Marvel is anything to go by, even that might be too much. The last season had a big drop off in the ratings, and it will be three years since we last saw the beskar bounty hunter onscreen. Star Wars has been taking a hit in its popularity, with no one watching the Disney+ shows, and the whole of Hollywood is struggling at the box office, with only a single movie barely cracking the one billion mark so far this year.

There’s no nostalgia benefit here either. No legacy characters returning from the original trilogy or prequels. How many older fans, who went to watch the sequels, even know what a Mandalorian or Grogu is? I doubt they’ll be queuing up on opening night.

At best this will be a trial run, a safe return for the franchise before the release of Star Wars: Starfighter in 2027. A chance to see whether or not anyone will still pay to see movies from a galaxy far, far away.

Far from being a loud, triumphant return for Star Wars, it looks very much like this will be a safe, mediocre, and slightly sad reflection of just how for the franchise has fallen in the last decade.