As subscribers grow, one would expect the most popular show on Disney+ to also grow. That does not seem to be the case — far from it.
Away from the eyes of most entertainment journalists and casual observers, The Walt Disney Company is falling apart. Most can be forgiven for not noticing. The news, after all, usually covers things after they happen, not before. And there are thousands of big companies in the world — surely not everyone can be focused on a single entertainment corporation and its spiral. But it’s worth noting and may be a warning sign to other entertainment companies the world over.
We’ve watched Disney hand over its animation crown to Universal, we’ve seen Phase Four and Phase Five of the MCU have financial failure after financial failure. We’ve even seen Star Wars suffer from longer “fatigue” than anyone really anticipated. There hasn’t been a Star Wars theatrical release since the sequel trilogy and it doesn’t seem there is one in sight. Now, the show that put Disney+ on the map may also be collapsing in terms of interest. While I won’t venture a guess here why that is, just know it represents a seismic shift throughout the industry in understanding the market of normies is plugged in and paying attention to cultural decisions by corporations now.
The big stat that should be catching your eye is that The Mandalorian Season 3 is looking to have debuted to an audience roughly half the size of Season 2. That parallels what we’ve seen with Black Panther 1 versus Black Panther 2. It parallels what we’ve seen with Antman 2 versus Antman 3. Across a number of Disney major releases, it appears that half the audience has disappeared.
How do we know this? Well, using Samba TV’s latest intra-comparison using their own data measurements for various show, then matching that up with the more reliable Nielsen for comparable, we arrive at a place where we now expect that when Nielsen shows The Mandalorian’s Season Three start, it will be roughly around 50% of the second season.
The Mandalorian Season 3 premiere had a relatively weak performance in comparison to some of the other Star Wars Disney+ series.
Although its viewership exceeded the recent Andor by close to 50%, it still trailed behind Obi-Wan Kenobi and The Book of Boba Fett premieres by 28% and 2%, respectively, while also falling short of Marvel Studios’ Loki premiere by 35%.
As shared by Samba TV, the first episode of Ewan McGregor’s Jedi spin-off was viewed by 2.14 million US households in the first four days. Meanwhile, the debuts of The Mandalorian Season 2 and The Book of Boba Fett were watched by 2.08 million and 1.5 million households, respectively.
— Sam Hargrave, The Direct
For a Disney Company looking to drive subscriptions higher on lower budgets, losing a stalwart such as The Mandalorian is one of the biggest punches in the gut we’ve seen so far. Perhaps it can rebound. It’s going to really need to or the impact on Disney+ could be significant.
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Disney is all about sequels and series that perform worse than before. Each time, it is easy to explain as Woke, but BAD WRITING is equally the culprit. We were constantly given the excuse that their reshoots are a natural process of making a movie or series, but it’s clear that the writing is so bad that it must be corrected after post production. So the projects can’t make their money bad and the audience knows a turd. They can’t make a Woke product better.
100% agree on the bad writing comment. The Mandalorian has never featured good writing but I forgave it during the first two seasons because its heart was in the right Star Wars place. Now, however, the whole thing in largely incoherent. Look at that clip of Favreau trying to suggest that Grogu had been with Luke for a year or two, when nothing in the BoBF suggested that – quite the reverse in fact. It’s frankly pathetic that the show’s writer doesn’t have such basic story foundations nailed down. This is the same problem that derailed the sequel trilogy. No plan.
No surprise at all. They won back my good will with the Mando season 2 ending (after the disaster of The Last Jedi) but then quickly destroyed that by firing Gina Carano for noxious, trumped up reasons and then effectively rebooting the whole Mandalorian story (and thus robbing Grogu of his development as a character, and sticking two fingers up at Luke again). Every time I invest in Disney Star Wars, they punch me in the gut. They must know what will work – the fact that they so deliberately destroyed it proves that. They just keep choosing not to do it. Madness. So why would I watch any more of it? They don’t respect either the source material or the audience. Heartbreaking at a cultural level when you remember the unifying influence that Star Wars used to be, and shear insanity at a business level.
You pretty much nailed what is going wrong with Mandalorian S3. Favreau seems to have been put in a box as far as what he is able to do with S3, having lost Carano, the re-involvement of Luke being tossed out the window, and the series being put “on ice” for a long period of time after season 2. Basically everything the fans liked about the series was taken away by Kennedy.
Frankly, I was expecting this one to fail almost as soon as it was announced. Disney really seems not to care about making money anymore. I guess they would rather see the company flail and fail than have to market to a fanbase they loathe with a mania that borders on the religious.
I am almost to the point of not reading articles for Star Wars.
I know there is nothing left of Star Wars. Reading the articles are depressing. Disney doesn’t want me as a customer.
I appreciate your coverage. Thank you.
We have to cover it, but it’s amazing how far they have let it fall without a course correction.
We few remaining Star Wars fans *need* Favreau’s Mandalorian to succeed if there’s to be any hope of recovering the property under its current owners, but he’s is swimming against a heavy tide over at Disney. He may have carte blanche over his characters and over what projects come when, but he doesn’t control writing, casting, or other major decisions. Even within the things over which he does have primary influence, Favreau needs to realize how important it is to break with Disney’s unworkable strategies.
Specifically, he needs to can The Acolyte, go out of his way to rehire Carano and make it public, consult with Lucas on story rather than the fey nepo baby writers he’s saddled with, avoid any hint of wokeness, and start catering to older fans’ sense of ownership of and investment in the franchise by pushing reasonably-priced toy sales and even 4K or bluray sales of the more popular shows, because *no one* is rewatching old seasons of Mando on D+ but they might fork out $40 per season if they can hold it in their hands and add it to a collection.
But when he says things like he did in that interview the other day, questioning whether anyone but a handful of middle-aged men care about the original, uncut trilogy on 4K/bluray, that doesn’t instill confidence that he knows how fandom works.
If Disney+ subscriptions are up but not growing as fast as Disney would like, both obviously true, and now The Mandalorian season 3 has seen a smaller viewership for its premiere; those are non-sequitur. A lot of the narrative of Disney failure you attribute to “culture war” causes, and granted I think they’ve done damage to themselves and their various brands, but can also be explained by the Covid crisis and fallout: The Mandalorian season 2 debuted when the crisis was still acute, a lot of people remained largely at home for most of 2020 in to 2021 meaning I’m sure they streamed a LOT more than they otherwise would have as series premiered. Season 1 enjoyed tremendous novelty as being the first live action Star Wars series and season 2 debuted at a time in-home entertainment would be probably the primary form of escape. This is pure anecdote but my experience has been a lot of people have expressed to me they’ll choose to binge this season and thus far I can’t blame them. They’ve moved away from the “adventure of the week” model to a more traditional streaming, long form storytelling.
I agree that the show can fail due bad writing rather than wokeness, but wokeness necessitates bad writing due to the rules: no female, minority or alphabet can have characters flaws (beyond not realising how awesome they already are) and males must be useless and can’t be heroic or find some competence. This means no characters have a meaningful arc and are completely unrelatable.