Ah, the Big Game. An annual chance for football fans to root for their team (frequently, if you happened to grow up in New England in the dynasty era like I did), take in some world-class entertainment at the halftime show, and load up not just on dairy and carb confections, but that most delectable of American treats… advertising! Lots of those immaculately produced commercials are there to remind you of products and services you already love (horse beer! Sports gambling app!), but ‘round the ol’ IGN, we get especially excited for the sneak peeks of upcoming movies and TV shows.
Super Bowl LX featured previews of some of 2026’s most anticipated releases. We got new looks at Supergirl, Disclosure Day, Scream 7, Hoppers, The Adventures of Cliff Booth, Minions and Monsters, Project Hail Mary, and The Super Mario Galaxy Movie. Studios, networks, and streamers use Super Bowl ad space (and the truckloads of money it takes to buy it) to let general audiences know what they’ve got cooking, and why you and everyone else you’re watching the game with should be getting jazzed for it. Hell, Netflix even dropped a whole-ass Cloverfield movie on us during one of these spots a few years ago, and a lot of people who may not have otherwise cared ended up watching it because of that hype… even if popular opinion has settled into that whole-ass Cloverfield movie being kinda half-assed. Point being: You can drive a lot of eyeballs to your movie or show with a well-placed Super Bowl ad.
But there was one ad this year for a summer 2026 release that put a pit in my stomach.
The Mandalorian and Grogu just used 30 very expensive seconds of Sam Elliott voiceover and the bones of a Budweiser advertisement to incept Silver Man and Green Boy back into your brains without showing off more of the $150 million-plus budgeted movie the two star in, which releases in just a few months.
I have a bad feeling about this.
In the early days of The Mandalorian’s meteoric popularity on Disney+, it seemed like the idea of eventually wrapping up the show’s story with a big summer blockbuster could be rooted in a desire to legitimize the streaming series as just as worthy of a theatrical release as any of the other Skywalker Saga or legacy-heavy spinoff movies. Sentiment around the show has wavered over the years, and even still, I don’t consider myself one of those people who believe the show’s gone off the rails. Largely, I haven’t minded The Mandalorian’s shift into exploring Mandalorian culture from perspectives other than Din Djarin’s, even if I do agree that it’s kept the narrative from feeling as cohesive and punchy as it did in the earlier days. Has the Disney era of Star Wars been perfect? Of course not. But at the end of the day, I’m just a boy, holding his broom aloft, looking out at the sky and hoping to see a good Star War.
So why isn’t Disney showing us more of the new Star War?
In these complicated times, I’m a big fan of the philosophical frame of “Occam’s razor,” or the idea that the simplest explanation is usually the right one. The first (and, to date, only) trailer for The Mandalorian and Grogu debuted at D23 in August 2024 and, naturally, leaked online immediately after that. Those trailers are supposed to be special, “you had to be there” moments for attendees of those kinds of events, but even through the off-screen recordings, it was clear that this first look wasn’t evoking much sense that Din Djarin and Grogu were getting all that much of a glow-up in their transition to the big screen. No, the overwhelming response has seemed to be some version of “it just looks like an episode of the show” or, more succinctly, “…that’s it?” Not even the additional footage added in the official release of the trailer late last year, not even Jeremy Allen White’s stronkboy Rotta the Hutt has seemed to be enough to move the needle on fan excitement. At least not that I’ve been able to see on my scanners and radars.
But Disney’s still got a movie to sell. So what do you sell when you’re seemingly averse to selling the movie itself? Based on the Big Game spot, it seems like the answer is nostalgia… for a 6-year-old branch of the Star Wars tree. Super Bowl ads are a hefty investment. Just 30 seconds of ad space costs $8 million. I can’t imagine Disney spent any less than a million bucks on sledge-bearing tauntauns, getting Sam Elliott into a VO booth, and getting Grogu out of his trailer. A drop in the bucket for Disney, sure, but it’s still a lot of money, and you’ve gotta wonder what the Mouse House was looking to buy with it.
To make an educated guess on that, let’s check out the component parts of the ad: Sam Elliott’s gravelly voiceover – a mainstay of American advertising – intoning about how “sometimes we choose our path,” and that we’re “driven by a deeper purpose.” Pair that with the distant sight of majestic creatures running through the snow, and eight seconds into this thing, visions of classic “yearning for simpler times” ads from beer or automotive companies are likely dancing through your head. It becomes clear right around then that these are tauntauns as Elliott mentions all that rugged individualism being guided by an “unseen force,” just as Grogu takes the reins from Din Djarin… with the unseen Force. The first half of the trailer gets your nostalgia juices boiling, the second half reminds you how damn cute that puppet is. The logo for the movie comes up, and we’re back to watching the Seahawks defense absolutely stymie the Pats.
Really, the full text of the ad’s voiceover makes this all as clear as Cerveza Cristal:
Sometimes we choose our path. Other times, the path chooses us.
Through it all, we keep pushing forward:
Driven by a deeper purpose, guided by an unseen Force.
The journey never gets any easier; the bond just gets harder to break.
This is the way.
Only in theaters and IMAX May 22.
WHAT DOES ANY OF THAT EVEN MEAN!? Look, I may be thinking a little too much about this, but if none of this has been rolling around in your noggin in the last 24 hours, I’d encourage you to think about it just a little more critically. From how Disney has chosen to frame this ad, the only conclusion I can draw from The Mandalorian and Grogu spot is that Disney sees value in letting us know the movie’s coming, but not in letting us see more of what the movie actually looks like.
Disney’s spent the last decade working out how best to serve its multi-billion dollar investment in the Star Wars franchise and do right by the fans at the same time – they’ve had unquestionable successes in that space. New leadership will inevitably revitalize and push that effort in different directions, and I’m optimistic it will lead to even more great Star Wars stories. Hem and haw about how scared you are about the potential Filonification of Star Wars, but after “somehow, Palpatine returned” and the trainwreck of Rise of Skywalker which followed, I’m happy to give Dave Filoni and Lynwen Brennan the benefit of the doubt. Fear leads to the dark side, after all. But the dawn of the New Lucasfilm Order has not yet touched the horizon: There’s night yet to journey through, and a commercial spoof’s not convincing me that we’re going to make it through the darkness unscathed.
Good or bad, I just wish The Mandalorian and Grogu, the first new Star Wars movie to hit theaters in seven years, wasn’t being treated like a dirty little secret. Because “unseen Force” is a phrase I want to associate with that which surrounds and binds us, not the Rotten Tomatoes consensus the Monday after the movie comes out. I’m going into it with a wary mind, but an open heart.
As the ad says, The Mandalorian and Grogu releases in theaters on May 22.
Tom Jorgensen is a senior video producer at IGN, where he also regularly reviews movies and interviews creative people. You can check out more of Tom’s stuff on his Instagram (@jomtorgensen), X (@tom_jorgensen), and Bluesky (@tom-jorgensen.bsky.social) accounts, where he promises to never refer to himself in the third person like he has to in this very text box right here.
