Sometimes being able to Monday morning quarterback a film is a little bit more interesting, because you get to see the car accident of film critics clashing over the initial release, fighting to get their opinions out there and determining whether or not they have the most valid opinion in the marketplace. Well, hold my beer, because the blind film critic has entered the chat. I did not see The Mandalorian and Grogu on the big screen. Of course, I really don’t see anything on the big screen, thus the blind film critic part. Instead, I watched this with audio description, and I had a blast with the track by Deluxe, narrated primarily by Nicole Zanzarella, along with two additional performers handling some of the subtitled alien languages. Nicole provides lovely primary narration, and this is one of the stronger tracks of the year. Starting right out of the gate, it helps shape the world as much as possible, describing the different aliens, worlds and landscapes, along with little details like insects, a snake digesting its food with the bulge moving through its body, or even something as simple as mentioning a droid rolling behind our lead characters. There’s quite a bit of production design here, and the audio description does an excellent job making sure blind audiences get as much of it as possible.

But this film certainly divided people, and I can see why. I am not technically part of the Star Wars generation that got to tell people they saw Star Wars in its initial theatrical release. I’m too young for that. I actually didn’t see the original Star Wars trilogy until the ’90s, when they were reissued in theaters. I didn’t own them on VHS, don’t remember seeing them on cable, and nobody ever made it a priority for me to see them as a child. But I did see all three before The Phantom Menace, so arguably the prequel trilogy is closer to my generation, as would be the sequel trilogy. The Mandalorian and Grogu, however, arrives several years after The Rise of Skywalker and follows characters created for Disney+. Grogu, initially known simply as the Child and basically referred to by the entire world as Baby Yoda, has since become a merchandising bonanza for Star Wars and Disney.

I think if Disney had kept The Mandalorian and Grogu as a Disney+ film, it would have a higher score across the board, because people wouldn’t feel like it needed to clear the higher bar established by a cinematic Star Wars movie. It really doesn’t match the scope of the previous 11 live-action theatrical films. Episodes I through IX, Rogue One and Solo all feel larger. They generally feature bigger ensembles, often bouncing between characters who initially don’t seem to be on the same path before eventually converging. The trilogies are telling larger stories across three films, while Rogue One and Solo still have that feeling of people coming together who weren’t necessarily together before. The ragtag group of misfits joining forces against the Empire is baked into the DNA of Star Wars. The Mandalorian and Grogu is basically an adventure featuring two characters you already like from a TV series.

That distinction matters. Had this debuted on Disney+ from the start, nobody would have thought twice about its smaller scale or lack of scope because it’s hard to say this doesn’t work as a Mandalorian movie. But tossing it into theaters announces that this is the same kind of thing as those other 11 movies, and it isn’t. You spend most of the time focused on the Mandalorian and Grogu, as the title suggests, as they are sent on a mission involving Rotta the Hutt, voiced by Jeremy Allen White. That takes up a solid chunk of the film before things go awry, and there’s even a section where you basically follow Grogu around on his own for a while as he learns how to be adorable and use the Force. This is an extra-long adventure with our two favorite characters from the show. When you take it as that, it’s easy to enjoy. It’s somewhat simplistic because it sets up a rather limited quest. They aren’t trying to blow up a Death Star, save an entire planet from destruction or prevent some massive galactic catastrophe. It’s basically a rescue mission with an adventure surrounding it.

Disney has spent the past several years struggling with this exact problem over at Marvel, trying to figure out how to bounce characters between movies and Disney+ without exhausting the audience. Using Disney+ to expand characters like Wanda, Vision and Loki made sense, and WandaVision and Loki benefited from characters audiences already knew from the movies. But then you get someone like Kamala Khan, who was introduced through Ms. Marvel before being sent directly into The Marvels. Suddenly Captain Marvel was splitting screen time with characters whose stories were heavily dependent upon Disney+ shows. It creates this disjointed relationship where audiences aren’t just following multiple Marvel movies every year, but multiple television shows as well. Star Wars has largely avoided that. It took Cassian Andor from Rogue One and gave him Andor, and Ewan McGregor’s Obi-Wan Kenobi got his own series, but neither was immediately bounced back into a movie. Ahsoka exists somewhere else in this increasingly tangled web. The Mandalorian and Grogu is really the first time Star Wars has taken one of its live-action streaming shows and tried to turn it directly into a theatrical franchise.

There’s a place and time for everything. Netflix actually had an interesting model with The Defenders, giving Daredevil, Jessica Jones, Luke Cage and Iron Fist their own shows before bringing them together, and keeping everything on Netflix. Those characters had room to blossom individually before the crossover. Even now, most of them haven’t needed theatrical movies to justify their existence. Disney could learn something from that. Not every character has to make the leap from television to theaters. Sometimes the better answer is simply to let a streaming franchise remain a streaming franchise. We’ve seen television-to-film transitions work before, like Sex and the City, and we’ve seen them fail, like Entourage. Even Netflix released its Peaky Blinders and Heartstopper films directly to streaming this year instead of testing whether those audiences would suddenly buy theatrical tickets.

Because I made a choice about where to watch The Mandalorian and Grogu, I enjoyed it for what it was. I watched it in the comfort of my living room, on Disney+, exactly where I watched the previous three seasons of The Mandalorian. To me, this felt like the logical progression of the series. They did three seasons and then they did a movie. If I pretended nothing else had happened, I would assume this could lead to more Mandalorian movies on Disney+. Sadly, the theatrical underperformance probably makes that much less likely. Once you attach box office numbers to something instead of streaming numbers, the perception changes. This movie could become one of the most watched films Disney+ has ever had and I still don’t know that Disney would make another Mandalorian movie. At best, they might return to another season. That’s oddly depressing, because once you’ve accepted these characters and their world, their adventures don’t necessarily need to come in eight-episode seasons. They can come in two-hour movies. You can make bigger, more invested cinematic adventures specifically for Disney+, but they have to be allowed to stay where the franchise started.

Marvel could be exploring the same thing, but mostly doesn’t. We got Werewolf by Night and other special presentations, but they hover around an hour and don’t quite feel like traditional features. Take Moon Knight, for example, who still hasn’t been assimilated into anything else. If Marvel wanted to test whether that character could sustain a movie, why not make a Moon Knight feature specifically for Disney+? You could have heroes designated primarily for Disney+ and others for theatrical films. A cameo is always fun, but when entire movies start revolving around characters whose development happened somewhere else, I think you start seeing diminishing returns. Look at Thunderbolts*. Enough people liked that film that it probably should have made more money than it did, but it was populated with characters who were either supporting players in previous movies or originated elsewhere in the Marvel machine. Audiences didn’t show up in numbers comparable to Marvel’s biggest films. The Mandalorian and Grogu was always gambling on whether a television audience would automatically become a theatrical audience.

If you were someone who liked Star Wars but never watched the Disney+ shows and thought, “Oh, another cinematic Star Wars movie, I should be able to jump right in,” I can understand the disappointment. Theoretically, if you’re casually familiar with The Mandalorian, you can follow this. It doesn’t constantly bombard you with lore or demand that you remember every plot point from three seasons. But I can also understand why people pushed back. Disney took a gamble and got perhaps the most predictable result possible. Without pulling in heavy hitters like Luke Skywalker, Darth Vader, Obi-Wan Kenobi, Chewbacca, Han Solo or Princess Leia, these limited characters struggled to carry what audiences expected from a major cinematic Star Wars feature. But they’ve already proven they can carry a television series. That’s the frustrating part. The movie didn’t prove that the Mandalorian and Grogu don’t work. It proved that context matters.

There are certainly pieces here that could continue. Jeremy Allen White could return as Rotta the Hutt. Sigourney Weaver could return. There’s even a fun vocal cameo from Martin Scorsese, along with other actors playing various bounty hunters and droids who could pop up in future Mandalorian projects. Then there’s Pedro Pascal, whose star continues to rise. Depending on how Behemoth does for him this year and whether that pushes him into the Oscar conversation, he may not need The Mandalorian as much as he once did. But I still enjoy Pascal here, just as I enjoyed him as Joel in The Last of Us and in plenty of projects before that. He plays this role exactly as he should. The Mandalorian is emotionally disconnected because he’s supposed to be. Given his background, he shouldn’t be crying every five seconds, screaming, cracking jokes or turning into Star-Lord. He’s a trained combat warrior with a deliberately narrow emotional range.

That’s also why Grogu is so important. Whether he’s eating something, getting into trouble, looking sleepy, trying to use the Force or wandering directly into danger, he’s still oddly endearing. I think it would be a huge mistake for Disney and Star Wars to walk away from him because Grogu is merchandising gold, but he’s also something even more important: a Star Wars character who genuinely broke through with a new generation. The actors connected to the original trilogy are aging, dying or otherwise becoming unable to return to these roles forever. You can’t artificially recreate everyone indefinitely. Meanwhile, the sequel trilogy characters never seemed to capture the culture quite as quickly or completely as Grogu did. In a popularity contest, I think Grogu beats any character introduced in The Force Awakens, even BB-8. Maybe that’s a hot take, but Baby Yoda was, is and probably will continue to be part of the future of Star Wars. We’re likely to see more standalone projects like Star Wars: Starfighter before anyone figures out what Episodes X, XI and XII are supposed to be anyway.

Now that the dust has settled and The Mandalorian and Grogu is sitting at home waiting for you, this is the perfect time and the perfect place to watch it. Frankly, this is where it should have been all along. Had it not been placed in direct competition with the grander scale of the previous 11 live-action theatrical Star Wars releases, I don’t think we would be having a conversation about whether The Mandalorian and Grogu was a failure. We might instead be talking about how many streaming records it broke. The world will never know. I enjoyed this, but I also really like The Mandalorian, and I think that’s an important distinction. These characters are so heavily tied to the series that I’m not sure you can fully enjoy this movie without having seen, or at least enjoyed, the show. However, if The Mandalorian is your thing, this is a fun adventure with two characters you already love, backed by one of the strongest audio description tracks of the year. The problem wasn’t necessarily the movie. The problem was asking it to be something bigger than it ever needed to be.

Fresh: 7.9/10