Last Night’s ‘The Mandalorian’ Trailer Wasn’t For You

Walt Disney is offering a new Star Wars show, a new MCU episodic and a new Pixar movie right as free subscriptions expire to convince general audiences that Disney+ is the room where it happens.

We got a new trailer for season two of The Mandalorian last night during Monday Night Football. That makes sense since the show is dropping new episodes on October 30, but this is the same mid-October Monday Night Football game during which Disney
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has dropped trailers for the last three Star Wars episodes. They dropped that killer The Force Awakens trailer (the one with that grandiose remix of the “Force theme”) on this very day on 2015, while the final trailers for The Last Jedi and The Rise of Skywalker debuted on October 9, 2017 and October 21, 2019 respectively. Last night’s Mandalorian trailer, alongside last month’s WandaVision teaser (during the Primetime Emmy Awards) and last week’s Soul trailer, is about a show of force for Disney+.

Like those last three respective Star Wars trailers, the 60-second teaser for The Mandalorian wasn’t aimed at the hardcore fans who already saw the first teaser, read all the rumors and speculation and were merely counting the hours until “opening day.” This preview, which wasn’t all that different from the first one last month and offered no buzzy first looks at (for example) Temuera Morrison’s Bobba Fett or Rosario Dawson’s Ahsoka Tano, was explicitly aimed at the millions of NFL fans who perhaps didn’t even know that a new season of the new Star Wars show was about to arrive. It’s the same reason Disney drops their big previews and trailers during football games, basketball games and Good Morning America: It’s about getting the general audience demographics.

Last night’s trailer, along with the other plugs in question, are a declaration that Disney+ is your one-stop shop for your favorite franchises. In a year with almost no big Hollywood movies since March, Disney+ is the only place offering new content from the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Pixar and the Star Wars galaxy. That’s partially why Disney made the choice, just days before the film would premiere to raves in London, to put Pete Docter and Kemp Powers’ Soul onto Disney+ in participating territories. That’s partially why they aren’t forcing folks to pay an additional $30 like they did last month with Mulan. Well, obviously Disney wasn’t that pleased with however many people paid to lease Mulan, but that’s only part of the bigger picture.

It was an experiment absolutely worth trying at least once, but the “subscription plus $30” leasing pitch for Mulan seemingly didn’t quite pan out. The conversation was dominated by speculation as to alleged PVOD revenue and poor box office (just $42 million) in China. We’ll find out at the next shareholder’s meeting about how many people allegedly forked over $30, but if it was anything close to compensating for lost domestic box office then they’d have likely done likewise with Soul. Better to just drop the Pixar movie for “free with Disney+” and hope that it takes a bit of thunder out of Universal’s PVOD plans for The Croods: A New Age (following a Thanksgiving theatrical release) and Warner Bros.’ still-on-the-board Wonder Woman 1984 Christmas theatrical release.

Disney got free press and good publicity when they released Hamilton (a filmed recreation of Lin Manual-Miranda’s stage show just before the original cast departed back in 2016) not into theaters in October of 2021 as intended but on Disney+ over Independence Day weekend. Hamilton was the most-streamed show or movie on any streaming platform in the month of July, even more so than Netflix’s
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The Old Guard. It turned out to be a big fish in a small(er) pond. I can’t say whether the number of new subscribers (or subscribers who stuck around when they otherwise would have canceled) was worth the $70 million acquisition price, but it was a show of force arguing that Disney’s streaming platform was the “room where it happened.”

The convenient arrival of The Mandalorian this month, Soul on Christmas and WandaVision presumably sometime in between is a bid to reassert Disney+, just as those one-year-for-free subscriptions for Verizon
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customers (and subscriptions for which consumers paid for the first year in advance) are set to expire in November. You want the new Pixar movie? You want this year’s big Star Wars “thing?” You want this year’s only MCU installment?  You want to see a new Frozen short or a LEGO Star Wars Holiday Special? Hell, you want the year’s big “live-action remake of a Disney toon” flick but but don’t feel like shelling out $29.99? Disney+ is going to argue that it is the one place to get the biggest (and otherwise denied) franchise-friendly offerings of 2020.

So, yes, in a skewed and (on multiple levels) cruelly ironic level, it makes sense that the big mid-October Monday Night Football trailer for a major year-end Disney release is A) a Star Wars TV show (instead of a Star Wars movie) and B) a streaming exclusive (as opposed to a theatrical release). It’s part of a year-end drive to convince would-be subscribers that Disney+ isn’t the home for merely substitute blockbusters like The New Guard or Project Power, but the genuine article of the biggest IP in town. With a Pixar movie, a Star Wars show and an MCU episodic, Disney+ is selling itself as, to quote a Fox smash that’s now a Disney movie, everything you ever want, everything you ever need, right in front of you.