LucasfilmIt may be cliché to say you “only watch the Super Bowl for the commercials,” but for movie fans who couldn’t care less about football, that is often exactly the case. The biggest sporting event of the year is the perfect time to get as many eyes on a trailer as possible, and these trailers often include big reveals that can make headlines on Monday morning. But when Super Bowl LX was held in Santa Clara, Star Wars fans were left as disappointed as Patriots fans when a highly anticipated trailer turned out to be nothing more than a 30-second parody. According to an industry report, this disappointment is being felt at Lucasfilm as well. In a wide-ranging report about the rise of new Disney CEO Josh D’Amaro, Variety mentioned this ad with a heavy dose of warning. “There are concerns that an unconventional 36-second Super Bowl spot for The Mandalorian & Grogu that featured the title characters riding a wagon pulled by Tauntauns failed to generate the kind of excitement the marketing team was hoping to spark,” the article claims. The Mandalorian & Grogu is already a risky project. There hasn’t been a theatrical Star Wars film since the divisive Rise of Skywalker back in 2019, and this is neither a flagship film nor a smaller project like Rogue One or Solo. Instead, it’s a movie spinoff of a TV series, completely uncharted territory for the franchise. There’s definitely an audience for The Mandalorian on Disney+, but its draw in a theater is a completely unknown entity. That’s why the Super Bowl ad was so disappointing. Fans are champing at the bit to learn anything about this big swing, but instead of any movie footage, we get a glimpse of Din Djarin and Grogu on Hoth in a parody of classic beer ads. Will Hoth and/or Tauntauns actually appear in the movie? At this point, it’s unlikely. What could have been a testing ground for a traditional trailer was instead used for an experimental gag commercial. | LucasfilmThe truly wasted opportunity for Lucasfilm is that this ad could have been the perfect test balloon to see how a massive audience would respond to a traditional trailer. Now, the response cannot be interpreted as distaste for the movie itself or for the strange format of this particular ad. With only a handful of months left before Star Wars returns to theaters, there are no do-overs. This premiere could make or break thefuture of Star Wars and determine if the TV universe can actually make the jump to the silver screen, or if the worlds will be kept as separate as Ahsoka from the events of Revenge of the Sith. The Mandalorian & Grogu premieres in theaters on May 22, 2026.