This morning Lucasfilm and Disney released the first official trailer for The Mandalorian and Grogu, the long-awaited first Star Wars movie to hit theaters since 2019’s The Rise of Skywalker. Although the clip kept details about the film’s story very close to its chest, it was packed with Easter eggs and references to Star Wars‘ past… and still gave us a few little hints about what to expect for the titular Mandalorian and his young ward.

The trailer opens with a very familiar ship flying across a coastline: an ST-70 assault ship, better known to viewers as the same class of gunship as the original ride of Din Djarin (Pedro Pascal), the Razor Crest. Of course, the Crest was destroyed in the climax of The Mandalorian season two, leading to Din piloting a Naboo N-1 Starfighter during the events of season three. It looks like in time for Mandalorian and Grogu, Din’s either gotten a new ST-70 or somehow managed to rebuild the Crest from what was left of its remains on the planet Tython. The three yellow stripes on the top of its hull at least pay a nice homage to his brief Naboo ride.

It’s worth pointing out as well that the gunship is flying towards what looks like Adelphi Base, the New Republic outpost first seen in season three. Built on the planet Adelphi (duh) in the Outer Rim, the station is home to Captain Carson Teva (Paul Sun-Hyung Lee) and a group of New Republic Rangers, who Din allied with in the climax of season three to let the Mandalorian become an unofficial independent contractor for the New Republic.

We get to immediately see some of that contract work in the next shot, as Grogu and Din spy on a building surrounded by Imperial Stormtroopers. Mandalorian and Grogu is set in approximately 9-ish ABY (After the Battle of Yavin), so we’re still only about four years after the formal end of the Galactic Civil War at the Battle of Jakku in 5 ABY. With Moff Gideon out of the way after his death on Mandalore, we know there are still plenty of other Imperial Warlords in current operation that will likely form a major antagonistic part of this movie (one of them, the returned Grand Admiral Thrawn, will instead be the focus of Ahsoka season two and the eventual Dave Filoni New Republic vs. Imperial Remnant film, first announced at Star Wars Celebration Europe in 2023).

Grogu starts investigating sewers with the help of a little Anzellan friend. We know there is a small cadre of Anzellan engineers (the species introduced in The Rise of Skywalker with Babu Frik) who work on Navarro, the world Din and Grogu retired back to after the events on Mandalore in season three, so this likely takes place there.

Back on Adelphi, Din and Grogu have a tense meeting with a New Republic liaison, played by the iconic Sigourney Weaver. While we don’t know the character’s name yet, we do know she is part of the senior command at Adelphi Base—imagery first shown at Star Wars Celebration Japan earlier this year showed Weaver wearing a New Republic flight suit, so we may see her in action at some point in the movie, instead of just disapprovingly keeping her snacks from Grogu.

Would it be Star Wars without a seedy cantina? Would it be Star Wars without a fight in that cantina? Who can say, but The Mandalorian and Grogu is clearly unwilling to contemplate otherwise.

Our first intriguing creature glimpse of the trailer sees a sinister-looking alien emerge out of waters in an underground cave (is this connected to what Grogu and the Anzellan were investigating earlier?). This is, of course, a classic Star Wars alien: an Amani, a species first seen with the bounty hunter Amanaman in Return of the Jedi. Whether this is Amanaman himself or another Amani remains to be seen. If it is, are there still potentially bounties out on Din or Grogu?

The Razor Crest takes flight, pursued by three fighters. It’s very hard to see what those ships are, but they match the general shape (and speed!) of TIE Interceptors.

After a quick shot of Grogu swimming (which certainly looks like it’s from similar scenes as the Amani footage, further potentially tying those two together), we get a similarly short shot of action starring a very interesting figure: Zeb from Star Wars Rebels (voiced by returning star Steven Blum) engaging in close-quarters combat with stormtroopers with his Lasat honor guard bo-rifle.

We already knew Zeb’s post-Rebels status from Mandalorian season three, where we briefly saw him stationed at Adelphi Base as a New Republic pilot, but footage screened to audiences at D23 last year showed him having a more involved role in this movie.

After another shot of Grogu hanging out with the Anzellans is followed by an intriguing shot for alphabet fighter nerds: Din jetpacking up to a U-Wing in New Republic livery. They were introduced in Rogue One and seen more recently in Andor season two, and this marks the first clear time we’ve actually seen U-Wings aligned with the New Republic (a few appeared in The Rise of Skywalker‘s climactic battle, but it was unclear as to whether they actually used the New Republic paint job).

We then cut to an arena where gathered crowds, including Din and Grogu (the former uttering one of the two lines of dialogue in the whole trailer, a simple “Impressive”), roar in celebration as we pan over to a very muscular Hutt yelling from the arena’s floor. We may know who this is, and it’s an absolutely wild one: we already knew that The Bear star Jeremy Allen White was joining Mandalorian and Grogu and that he would be playing Rotta the Hutt.

The son of Jabba, Rotta was first introduced in the 2008 animated Clone Wars movie that kicked off the beloved animated series, where the youngling Rotta (mostly called “Stinky” in that film by newly introduced padawan Ahsoka Tano) was the victim of a kidnapping extortion plot by the Separatist-backed Ziro the Hutt in an attempt to scuttle negotiations between Jabba and the Galactic Republic. Could this be Rotta all grown up? Is this what he was doing instead of taking over his father’s crime syndicate on Tatooine, leading to the events of The Book of Boba Fett?

Whether that’s Rotta or whatever happens in the arena, things seemingly go quickly against Din—this next shot of him battling two hulking droids is set somewhere affiliated with the Hutts: that symbol on the wall behind the droids is the emblem of the Desilijic clan, which Jabba (and Rotta, by birth) was part of, making it even more likely that this is part of Rotta’s operation.

We also cut back to the arena to see that, at some point, Din starts wrestling with a giant reptilian creature. This is, again, another Star Wars Easter egg: the creature is actually a Mantellian Savrip. Hailing from the planet Ord Mantell, a Savrip was famously used as one of the holographic creature pieces in dejarik, the chess-like strategy game seen being played by Chewbacca and R2-D2 in A New Hope. This marks the first time we’ve actually seen one of the creatures in the flesh in Star Wars‘ current canon!

The trailer crescendoes with Din flying out of an exploding Imperial AT-AT, letting it crumple and fall over a precipitous cliff edge. Fans at Star Wars Celebration Japan got an extended version of this scene, which sees Din infiltrate the walker and dramatically take out its entire crew of snowtroopers before detonating the vehicle from the inside.

The trailer ends back with Grogu and the Anzellans, this time fighting off another creature: a large, one-eyed sewer rat. Grogu shoots the rat in its monoeye with a green paint dart, seemingly using the wrist gauntlet he was given while training with the Mandalorian covert in season three. Looks like Din’s been keeping up with his lessons! That gives us our second line of dialogue in the whole trailer, as one of the Anzellans tells Grogu, “Good shot, baby.” At least it didn’t sound like a curse this time?

Although our first official look at The Mandalorian and Grogu is packed with nods to Star Wars things we already know, in terms of really telling us things about the film, it’s very threadbare. This is a vibes-based glimpse at the movie that is still eight months away, so there’s little in the way of explicit information about the plot or the characters or, well, anything really other than the expectation that Mando will shoot some Imperials and Grogu will be cute and do cute things.

That might be enough for some, but as Lucasfilm prepares to take Star Wars back away from the world of TV that it’s largely sat in on Disney+ for the past half-decade—off the back of the huge success of The Mandalorian in the first place—it might take a bit more than knowing references and a familiar vibe to intrigue people (especially while parent company Disney is facing a lot of public scrutiny over its controversial decision to censor Jimmy Kimmel in the face of threats from the Trump administration and right-wing groups).

We’ve got plenty of time to learn more about The Mandalorian and Grogu (and for Disney to resolve the crisis it currently faces), however, ahead of its arrival in theaters May 22, 2026.

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