Here’s Why There Are No Early Reviews Of Disney Plus’s ‘The Mandalorian’
Disney+ debuts in just three days, along with its signature show, The Mandalorian, Jon Favreau’s big budget, non-Jedi live action series that stars Pedro Pascal as a mysterious Mandalorian, and boasts quite a supporting cast to boot.
But strangely, there have been zero early previews for the show. No early reviews. This is generally not how the debut of most shows works, as critics are sent out screeners and given an embargo date to report their thoughts. For instance, for the last season of The Walking Dead I was sent the first three episodes about a month early, and told I could write a review a week before release to let people know if it was good or not (it was!).
The reason you are not seeing any early reviews of The Mandalorian is that there have not been any screeners for the show sent to critics. There have reportedly been screenings for fans and fansites, but actual screeners for major outlets do not exist, at least not for the initial episode here. A few weeks ago there was a screening for some media members, but it was just an “extended preview” of about 30 minutes, not a full episode. Impressions seemed largely positive.
Disney claims that this is because they don’t want at least one major, early-on spoiler getting out ahead of time. This has ruffled the feathers of critics, and many are claiming that it could be a bad sign for the show’s quality if screeners aren’t being sent out, as Disney doesn’t launch with bad buzz, but I’m not sure if I buy that. While most critics are trust worthy you will definitely often seen screener information leaking online, so I don’t think what Disney is saying is untrue, as much as I’d like a screener myself.
Without having any inside knowledge, I have had a long-running theory that the big “spoiler” revealed early on is that The Mandalorian is actually going to be a show about Boba Fett. Pascal is playing Fett inside new armor. The previews obscure this fact, but it’s definitely weird the character is not named, and I believe this is a “Fett crawled out of the Sarlacc pit” situation that echoes developments from the old expanded universe, and that may in fact be revealed in the pilot. This is a theory I’ve held for a long time, and now even more so with all this talk about an early plot turn that Disney doesn’t want revealed. I simply don’t know what else it would be, if this is supposed to be a story pretty much entirely disconnected from the rest of Star Wars.
I could be wrong and it might be something else, but we’re not going to know until Tuesday. I do hope Disney starts giving out screeners eventually after the show premieres and this initial spoiler is now out in the general public, but we’ll see if they do or not. It would be nice, but honestly I don’t really mind just watching every week like everyone else and writing up my thoughts the next day, it’s really not a huge deal.