The weekend box office numbers are in for The Mandalorian and Grogu, and while the movie brought in about $100 million, it still represents the lowest-ever opening for a Star Wars film. The consensus seems to be that The Mandalorian and Grogu is underwhelming, in part because it feels too small in scope to be a Star Wars movie. That’s entirely fair, but maybe it's also a good thing for the future of the franchise. Hear me out: Not every Star Wars movie needs to be about the fate of the entire galaxy — at least, not anymore.

The Mandalorian and Grogu picks up not long after the third season of the Disney Plus series The Mandalorian. While Din Djarin (Pedro Pascal) is back to bounty hunting, his priority now is raising Grogu, so he’s no longer taking jobs from those he considers to be morally corrupt, opting to work for the New Republic instead. However, when he’s assigned to a mission that involves doing a favor for a pair of Hutt gangsters in exchange for information, he finds himself tracking down the son of the deceased Jabba the Hutt.

None of that even comes close to the kind of epic space opera we typically associate with a Star Wars movie, and The Mandalorian and Grogu ultimately amounts to little more than a rescue mission for Rotta the Hutt (Jeremy Allen White), who has no interest in inheriting his father’s crime empire. Instead, as Rotta repeatedly states, he wants to be his own man and escape his father’s sizable shadow.

In addition to Rotta’s story, the other biggest theme in the movie is about the eventual fate of........

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