Financial Analyst Calls For Lucasfilm And The Walt Disney Company To Cancel Dave Filoni’s Mandoverse Movie After Poor ‘Ahsoka’ Ratings

John F. Trent |

Oct 10, 2023

Financial analyst Valliant Renegade called for The Walt Disney Company and Lucasfilm to scrap their recently announced Mandoverse movie to be directed by Dave Filoni following the poor ratings of Ahsoka on Disney+.

LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA – FEBRUARY 28: Executive Producer Dave Filoni attends the Mandalorian special launch event at El Capitan Theatre in Hollywood, California on February 28, 2023. (Photo by Jesse Grant/Getty Images for Disney)

Lucasfilm announced they were developing a Mandoverse movie with Dave Filoni at the helm back in April during the company’s Star Wars Celebration in London.

A press release covering the details explained, “Expanding upon Star Wars storytelling in the present, Dave Filoni will orchestrate the escalating war between the Imperial Remnant and the fledgling New Republic. Alongside producer Jon Favreau, they will bring together many of the threads of the Star Wars original series in a cinematic event.”

Ahsoka Tano (Rosario Dawson) with purrgil in a scene from Lucasfilm’s STAR WARS: AHSOKA, exclusively on Disney+. ©2023 Lucasfilm Ltd. & TM. All Rights Reserved.James Gunn’s DCU Slate Features Tom King As One Of The Chief Architects, A Massive Red Flag For Any DC Fan

Around the same time as that announcement, Lucasfilm saw their The Mandalorian Season 3 premiere viewership fall below the Season 2 premiere numbers.

Nielsen reported the week of the season premiere saw the entire series only bring in 823 million minutes.

Nielsen “Overall” Streaming Ratings for Week of February 27 to March 5, 2023

In contrast the show brought in 1.030 billion minutes the week the Season 2 premiere debuted on Disney+. Thus total minutes viewed for The Mandalorian Season 3 premiere declined by 207 million minutes.

If one does a simple calculation where you divide the show’s run time by the number of minutes watched, one might think that Season 3 had a larger viewer audience as it would have 21.65 million viewers compared to 18.4 million viewers for Season given Season 3’s run time was only 38 minutes compared to Season 2’s 56 minutes.

However, the way Nielsen tracks shows is that it tracks every single episode. So it’s likely a significant amount of the minutes watched for The Mandalorian Season 3 were done through binge watching of Season 1 and 2.

Following the poor performance of The Mandalorian Season 3, Lucasfilm released Ahsoka, which has performed even worse than The Mandalorian Season 3.

The series only the opening week bring in 829 million minutes viewed according to Nielsen. And that includes both the first and second episodes.

Nielsen “Overall” Streaming Ratings for Week of August 21 to August 27, 2023

By its second week on the Nielsen charts, the viewership numbers had declined to 487 million minutes.

Nielsen “Original” Streaming Ratings for Week of August 28 to September 3, 2023

They fell even farther in its third week to 459 million minutes.

Nielsen “Original” Streaming Ratings for Week of September 4 to September 10, 2023

After an analysis of these numbers as well as those published by Lucasfilm claiming they had 14 million views for the first episode of Ahsoka, Valliant Renegade asserted, “And those numbers seem to be getting worse and worse each and every week as new numbers come out from Nielsen. We’re still waiting for episodes 5 through 8 and I expect to see a similar trend to what we saw in week three.”

“It’s not a matter of Ahsoka of being a good or bad show or whatever your personal opinion is. It’s simply a matter that there aren’t enough eyeballs on it to justify turning this into a $400 million capital expenditure for a theatrical release.”

He later declared, “There is no business sense for The Walt Disney Company to allow a major Star Wars theatrical release based in this storyline, the Dave Filoni Star Wars storyline to go to theaters especially helmed by Dave himself. The audience simply isn’t there to justify what would be an over $400 million expense. The global audience that would have to come in to cover those costs would be fairly enormous. You’d need to be getting close to a billion dollars in global box office to do that.

Valliant Renegade continued, “And with a story and characters that the vast majority of fans and Star Wars crowds out there in the globe are relatively unfamiliar with or completely unfamiliar with, this show did nothing to help that case. This show did not seem to move the needle.”

Next, he said, “Star Wars seems to be serving a smaller and smaller audience, a more niche audience each and every show. Yeah there’s a lot of rabid fans out there, but they’re just shrinking in number and the budgets that these projects command are just too enormous to continue long term.”

“I think if Disney is stuck on the notion of taking the Dave Filoni Verse, the Dave Filoni brand of Star Wars and turning it into a feature length film, they had better keep it exclusively on Disney+ because a theatrical release would probably be an absolute humiliation,” he concluded.

(L-R): Sabine Wren (Natasha Liu Bordizzo), Ahsoka Tano (Rosario Dawson) and Ezra Bridger (Eman Esfandi) with Night Troopers in Lucasfilm’s STAR WARS: AHSOKA, exclusively on Disney+. ©2023 Lucasfilm Ltd. & TM. All Rights Reserved

What do you make of his analysis and commentary? Should Disney cancel the Dave Filoni movie?

NEXT: Report: ‘Ahsoka’ Season 2 Not “Locked Yet”

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