Disney, The Mandalorian and the fight for streaming supremacy

The streaming giants are battling it out for subscribers – and the success of ‘The Mandalorian’ has taken the fight up a notch, with Disney Plus now hot on the heels of Netflix, writes James Moore

Grogu, the oh-so-cute little green sidekick in ‘The Mandalorian’, has played a huge part in Disney’s overperformance in attracting almost 87 million subscribers (Rex)

Is that from The Mandalorian?” the medical professional asked, spying the hat I’d just taken off before getting down to business on Zoom (of course). Among my growing collection is one featuring the likeness of Baby Yoda, or the Child, or as viewers of the show now know, Grogu, bought for me by my kids.

She was indeed right. The artwork featured on the beanie, which has come in very handy given how unfriendly the cold weather is towards my follicly challenged head, was indeed inspired by what’s become a global pop culture phenomenon. When random people you bump into know the character and the show featured on your woolly hat, and talk delightedly about it before getting down to business, you know that the property has pushed way beyond geek-dom and moved squarely into the mainstream.

The Mandalorian has pulled off the trick in an age when new streaming services, each with their own roster of new shows fighting for attention alongside the output of more traditional broadcasters, seems to launch every couple of months. The Star Wars spin-off, which has just finished its second season on Disney Plus, is avidly discussed everywhere from schoolyards to American football podcasts (I listen to them, and I’ve heard it there).

Naturally, it has produced an avalanche of merchandise. It isn’t just hats. There are T-shirts, action figures, bags, hoodies, Lego kits, models, posters, you name it. Fan-art – some very good – is everywhere. The show is also expected to find its way into Disney’s theme parks when they are allowed to reopen. And what better way to turbo-charge their recovery?

But its impact on Disney Plus, its ability to draw subscribers to the fledgling service, is by far the biggest prize given the big bet the company has made on streaming.

The company’s executives last month revealed that the service had drawn 86.8 million subscribers. To put that figure in context, when the Plus launched in the US in November 2019 those same executives had targeted a high estimate of 90 million by the end of 2024. They are now aiming for nearly three times that number, between 230-260 million by the end of that date.

Netflix, of course, has already broken through the 200 million barrier. But the big dog can see Disney Plus looming in its rearview mirror, especially if it’s linked with Disney’s Hulu and ESPN Plus services with which it can be bundled stateside. They have 134 million subscribers combined.

The pandemic, and the lockdowns imposed across the world as a result, has obviously been a major driver of that growth. But what would the numbers have looked like without the service’s lone “must watch” show when Netflix has multiple offerings in that category? How many subscribers would Plus have been reporting if it had been a stinker?  

Disney’s decision to release new episodes weekly, rather than dumping the whole lot in one go a la Netflix, was very smart

The Mandalorian sticks out in the top 10 streaming charts put out by Nielsen, which have otherwise been utterly dominated by Netflix offerings, either through home-produced hits like The Queen’s Gambit and The Crown, or bought-in content. Netflix had nine of the top 10 positions in the most recent rankings, nine of the top 10 in its year-end rankings. The Mandalorian’s bravura final episode, which had fans in ecstasy with the return of one of the franchise’s big guns (thanks to the magic of de-ageing technology) however, helped pushed the show into the number one slot, Disney’s first.

Without the Beskar-armoured wanderer and his oh-so-cute little green sidekick, Disney might otherwise have been left looking like a wonky-engined X-wing struggling back to its home base after taking several hits from the Empire’s TIE fighters.

Prior to the launch, the parent company produced a glossy three-hour trailer for the service, one of those grandiose marketing aids that executives love but most people probably look at for a minute or two, at best, before moving on to the video of the cute kitten on a skateboard that’s gone viral. It showcased everything that would be available on day one in the US, culled from the company’s glittering library including the works of Pixar, Marvel Studios, Lucasfilm (Star Wars) and National Geographic. Also featured were the films and classic animations produced under Disney’s own name and its various series.

In total, there were more than 7,000 TV episodes and 500 movies. But they were almost all from its admittedly formidable library of past hits. To take on Netflix, the new service needed more. The lack of anything more has been noticed.

As far back as March, Screen Rant accused the service of “failing to deliver on its promises”, citing the dearth of new content. It noted Disney hasn’t exactly helped itself with questions around what the family friendly service should and shouldn’t show. Comic book violence, sure, but the complexities that can emerge from relationships not so much (this helped kill the Lizzie McGuire revival).

Blaster shots like that have so far deflected off the Mandalorian’s armour but for how long? He’s so important that he and Grogu have pride of place at the top of the company’s investor relations site. Money managers and Wall Street analysts watch the show too. And they watch its impact on the numbers even more closely, especially its impact on subscribers who’ve been prepared to put up with thin gruel when it comes to new content to get their fix. Disney’s decision to release new episodes weekly, rather than dumping the whole lot in one go a la Netflix, to keep the pot boiling for longer was very smart.

It’s true that Plus has also debuted some offerings aimed at younger children, but they’re not enough to move the mainstream needle. There was also, of course, the filmed version of the smash hit Broadway musical Hamilton, while the pandemic meant Pixar’s probable Oscar contender Soul had its cinema release pulled in favour a Christmas Day release on the channel. The live action Mulan went down a similar route but charged subscribers £20 for an early sighter.

But these were like oases in the desert planets over which Mando strides, especially when compared to Neflix’s schedule of releases.

A lot is now riding on the performance of WandaVision, based on the odd couple from the Avengers franchise in a high-concept tribute to classic American sitcoms that debuted last week, all the more given the price rises Disney Plus subscribers are going to get hit with (although the service will still be appreciably cheaper than Netflix afterwards).

WandaVision has been well received. The first couple of episodes were entertainingly weird and the trailers suggest that there’s more to come. I give it high marks, but while I could be wrong, I don’t see it having The Mandalorian’s impact.

Disney executives clearly owe a debt to its creator Jon Favreau, perhaps best known to the general public as Happy Hogan from the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU). Favreau has played Tony Stark/Ironman’s put-upon sidekick and Peter Parker/Spider-Man’s reluctant mentor in several MCU movies.

There are those who’d say, well of course The Mandalorian would keep things ticking over. Favreau was working with Star Wars. Duh. But using Star Wars wasn’t quite the slam dunk it might appear to be for the service. For a start, it’s a movie-led franchise. There have been animated shows on TV, specifically aimed at children as opposed to the all-ages attracted to the cinema releases. The Clone Wars, the last season of which has done well for Disney Plus, is quite dark and won the approval of many adult fans, but The Mandalorian is the first live action TV outing. It emerged at a pivotal time for the venerable franchise.

Sci-fi allows you to make westerns without the problems that became glaringly obvious when people started paying attention to the history books

Rian Johnson’s The Last Jedi, the second outing in the movie franchise’s third trilogy, was justifiably lauded by critics. It’s up there among the best along with The Empire Strikes Back and Rogue One, a spin-off set just prior to A New Hope (or Star Wars to the many who saw it when the juggernaut started its roll in 1977).

Johnson sought to subvert fans’ expectations and take the franchise in a new direction. It didn’t go down well with a portion of the fan base but it still managed to gross a handy $1.3bn at the global box office. Trouble is, the semi-backlash seems to have played a role in prompting JJ Abrams to undo much of Johnson’s movie with his finale, The Rise of Skywalker.

The trilogy, which promised so much upon the release of the critically acclaimed The Force Awakens, which grossed more than $2bn, ended on a decidedly downbeat note. Skywalker secured a lower Rotten Tomatoes score than even the three movies that made up Episodes 1, 2 and 3, George Lucas’s shaky prequel trilogy. Its 52 per cent is the lowest score yet received by a Star Wars film. Its fan reaction tracking CinemaScore was also the lowest recorded by a Star Wars live-action movie.

A sort of greatest hits show with some glaring plot holes, it compared particularly badly with Disney’s other big franchise finale, Avengers: End Game. The epic conclusion to 21 previous films in the MCU’s Infinity Saga grossed a record $2.8bn, unadjusted for inflation, knocking James Cameron’s Avatar from its perch. It also was the highest grossing Marvel film by nearly $800m.

While Skywalker’s $1.074bn is not to be sniffed at, it’s not in the same league and was $200m behind its predecessor to boot. Deadline Hollywood put its profits at $300m, a very handy sum, but below Rogue One.

Those numbers are positively balmy when compared to Solo: A Star Wars Story, Deadline Hollywood’s fourth biggest box office bomb of 2018, with an estimated loss just shy of $80m. Fans just didn’t buy into Ron Howard’s Han Solo origin story.

It’s clearly much easier to launch your new venture with a series that is part of a global mega-franchise than it is to try to create one from scratch. But the results from those two films, especially Solo, had led to talk of “franchise fatigue”. Hiring a pilot from the wildly successful MCU – Favreau was the director of Iron Man and Iron Man 2 as well as Disney’s live action Jungle Book and The Lion King – was clearly a smart move.

Armed with a fat budget and the ability to call upon high-profile directors such as Taika Waititi (Thor: Ragnorak, Jojo Rabbit), he wisely went back to the western genre for his inspiration. The sort of space-hopping sci-fi films and shows that put Einstein’s theory of relatively to one side often have their roots in the western, once a dominant force in Hollywood popular culture. The spaceship is the horse, the blasters/lasers/phasers are six-guns, the lawless planets on the outer rim sub in for frontier towns. As for the hostile aliens, they play the role that native Americans were so often unfairly shoehorned into.

Sci-fi allows you to make westerns without the problems that became glaringly obvious when people started paying attention to the history books and realised that the way they were portraying “injuns” was profoundly racist.

The force was with Akira Kurosawa before George Lucas knew what it was

Gene Roddenbury got the space western ball rolling with the original Star Trek TV series, which he memorably described as “Wagon Train to the Stars”. And with A New Hope, George Lucas re-made The Magnificent Seven in space.

The Star Wars saga was actually inspired by Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai, of which The Magnificent Seven is a remake, and the great Japanese director’s Hidden Fortress, featuring the very obvious prototypes for C-3PO and R2-D2. Seeing Hidden Fortress for the first time was a revelation for me, having enjoyed a relationship with the Star Wars franchise for more than 40 years. It could be seen as the best Star Wars prequel anyone’s made.

But given that Star Wars is set “a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away” you could make the case that it’s actually a sequel. Regardless, the force was with Kurosawa before Lucas knew what it was. However, the setting of A New Hope, and the vibe, is clearly western which makes The Magnificent Seven the most obvious comparison.

For his show, Favreau zeroed in on Sergio Leone’s spaghetti westerns featuring “the Man with No Name” portrayed by Clint Eastwood. The Chilean actor, Pedro Pascal, who plays the Mandalorian, even speaks with a distinctly Eastwoodian rasp from behind the helmet he has removed only on a couple of occasions throughout the show’s run and which takes the place of a cowboy hat.

This was also, on the face of it, a somewhat risky move. If Disney Plus couldn’t cope with the threat to its wholesomeness posed by a more grown-up Lizzie McGuire, how would a morally conflicted anti-hero, bearing a more than passing resemblance to a character capable of some truly spectacular explosions of violence, fare?

Very well as it turns out. Mando’s rough anti-hero edges are soon smoothed by the developing relationship with his young sidekick (I know, officially, Grogu is more than 50 years old but Yodas live for a thousand years so he looks and acts like a child). As for the violence, it’s there. There’s an impressively high body count. But it’s kept at the comic book level.

You do sometimes wonder what it would have been like if Mando had been more morally conflicted for longer. It might also be interesting if his religious fanaticism, alluded to but never closely explored, was given more of a storyline.

These, however, are quibbles. The Mandalorian is, at its core, a superb piece of escapism that represents its parent franchise far better than the most recent movie outing– outings if you include Solo. Like The Rise of Skywalker it isn’t above indulging in fan service, especially in the final episode of Season 2, but it succeeds where the film failed because it manages to do so without making it feel contrived.

Where it really wins is with its world building. Set in the aftermath of the rebels’ victory at the end of Return of the Jedi, there is, in the show, the constant feeling of a galaxy far, far away enduring a painful comedown. Sure the Empire was mad and bad, but the new rulers are portrayed as, well, not up to much. The second Death Star was destroyed, but after the party it suggests that not much has really changed. The strong still play on the weak, and it isn’t just the remnants of Darth Vader’s space fascists who are it. The feeling of post-revolution ennui, common to the real world but not so commonly explored in pop culture, is done very well. It has helped to elevate the show into something beyond a money-spinning spin-off.

To ensure Dinsey Plus lives up to its bosses’ ambitious new targets, the service will need at least some of the Marvel/Star Wars shows which follow it to pull off a similar trick. While a third season has been promised, it looks set to be a long time in coming. In the meantime, The Book of Boba Fett, set in the same milieu, will have a shot at filling the hole it’s leaving behind when it emerges at the end of the year.