Lucasfilm didn’t skimp on the first day of Star Wars Celebration 2025 in Tokyo. Hot on the heels of the announcement that Star Wars: Starfighter is heading to theaters in 2027, Lucasfilm turned the spotlight to the next film in the Star Wars franchise: The Mandalorian & Grogu. This continuation of The Mandalorian is currently in post-production, but fans in Tokyo got the chance to see the first footage from the movie.
Via The Hollywood Reporter, the film’s director and co-writer, Jon Favreau, appeared alongside the other co-writer, Dave Filoni. They were also joined by Pedro Pascal, Sigourney Weaver, and even an animatronic Grogu that walked out on stage and waved to the audience.
The opening scene of the preview featured Din Djarin (Pascal) breaking into an AT-AT and fighting the snowtroopers who were on the inside in one long continuous take on his way to the cockpit. Weaver’s character wasn’t named in the clip, but she claims that Din and Grogu are working for her now. The rest of the sizzle reel including a glimpse of Jabba the Hutt’s son, Rotta the Hutt, as voiced by The Bear’s Jeremy Allen White. Some of the other scenes showed Grogu demonstrating his powers and his ongoing love of snacking. More impressively, an AT-AT fell down a snowy cliff, presumably due to Din’s actions inside of it.
While on stage, Pascal recalled how he joined the franchise prior to the launch of The Mandalorian on Disney+.
“I’ll never forget the first day that I got to sit down with Jon and Dave in the writers room,” recalled Pacal. “And they showed me, wall-to-wall story illustrations of the first season of Mandalorian, without me even understanding who they expected me to play. And I remember just seeing the greatest visual storyboards that I had ever seen, and knowing that people were going to lose their minds.”
THR’s report notes that Favreau and Filoni were originally working on The Mandalorian season 4 before the 2023 Hollywood strikes. Afterwards, the decision was made to end the franchise’s seven-year gap between movies with two of the most popular characters in the post-George Lucas era.
The Mandalorian & Grogu will be released on May 22, 2026.
