The Walt Disney Company is probably hoping that upon viewing the new trailer for the upcoming Star Wars film The Mandalorian and Grogu, audiences feel a swell of nostalgia. No, not for 1977, when Star Wars was fresh and wondrous; after all, Disney didn’t even own it then. Not even for a decade ago, when the company brought the film series roaring back with 2015’s The Force Awakens, still the highest-grossing movie in US box office history. Rather, the trailer, consciously or not, hopes to transport viewers, and presumably profits, back to the halcyon days of … 2019.
They would probably settle for any time before their brief but tumultuous suspension of Jimmy Kimmel from ABC became national news. But 2019 would be preferable. That year, Disney’s almost unprecedented box office domination, boasting an astonishing seven of the year’s 10 biggest hits – and an eighth featuring Spider-Man, a Disney-owned character in a movie produced by Disney’s Marvel Studios (but released by Sony). Remakes of Aladdin and The Lion King, sequels to Toy Story and Frozen, two to three Marvel installments (depending on how to count Spider-Man), and a new Star Wars movie added up to around $10bn in global grosses. If the Star Wars movie The Rise of Skywalker landed a little soft compared to its better-reviewed predecessors, even that cloud had a silver lining: the late 2019 debut of The Mandalorian on the then new Disney+ streaming service was an instant sensation. Even genuinely rapacious corporate moves, such as Disney’s purchase of 20th Century Fox, were greeted in some fan corners with unthinking delight, because it meant some errant licensed Marvel characters could be in the MCU.
