Star Wars didn’t invent Memorial Day, but the holiday was a relatively new concept when George Lucas’ surprise hit opened on May 25, 1977. In the late ’60s and early ’70s, the holiday formerly known as Decoration Day, which originally honored Union soldiers and, after World War II, all service members, became Memorial Day. But for Hollywood’s purposes, the real impact came from the date, which moved from May 30 to the final Monday in May, giving potential moviegoers a fixed three-day weekend nationwide. With The Mandalorian And Grogu, Disney reasserts a tradition. The first six Star Wars movies opened on or around Memorial Day, before The Force Awakens broke the trend. After trying to reclaim the holiday for Star Wars in 2018, when Solo bombed, Disney has filled the slot with empty-calorie live-action remakes of animated classics that leave audiences hungry for the real thing, which are conveniently found on Disney+. An adaptation of something else on that streamer, Mandalorian And Grogu sees Disney attempt to fit the original Memorial Day blockbuster into its modern mold.
Star Wars and Memorial Day had an immediate symbiotic relationship, providing a nation of children free from school with space opera. Opening the Friday before Memorial Day, in just 43 theaters, Star Wars reached number two at the box office, initially outpaced by the second-highest-grossing film of 1977, Smokey And The Bandit. Hollywood is slow to jump on trends and didn’t have a big release for 1978’s three-day summer kickoff, though a re-release of Lucas’ breakthrough, American Graffiti, did capitalize on the director’s success. But Fox would be ready in 1979, when it released Alien over Memorial Day weekend, following that up a year later with the first Star Wars sequel, The Empire Strikes Back.
Within three years of Star Wars, the holiday was of utmost importance to exhibitors. After Star Wars‘ first Memorial Day, the number of theaters in which movies would premiere on opening day and the amount of money they could generate at the box office exploded. Empire Strikes Back opened in 126 theaters before rolling out to more than 1,300 by August. Return Of The Jedi opened on more than a thousand screens. The following year, fellow Lucasfilm release Indiana Jones And The Temple Of Doom debuted on 1,600. By 1985, Memorial Day looked like the sequel-heavy movie holiday we know today, with the final Roger Moore-led Bond film, A View To A Kill, hitting more than 1,500 screens, and Rambo: First Blood Part II on 2,000.
“The summer movie season was invented by the architectural firm of Spielberg and Lucas,” Paul Dergarabedian, Head Of Marketplace Trends at Comscore, tells The A.V. Club. “It’s an 18-week season, running from the first Friday in May through Labor Day Monday, and it accounts for, on average, close to 40% of the total year’s domestic box office take. Memorial Day weekend is one of the biggest movie-going holidays on the theatrical release calendar, like the Super Bowl and the World Series combined.”
Unlike other summer holidays, Memorial Day offers a fixed three-day weekend and no previously scheduled explosive entertainment. It also arrives before people tend to go on vacation, which is why its little cousin, Labor Day (when would-be moviegoers are out of town), is typically one of the lower-grossing weekends of the year. With all those people off work and school, theaters need familiar faces on screen and movies with content discernible from a poster. “Studios feel that what audiences are looking for, on Memorial weekend—not necessarily throughout the year, or even throughout the summer—is more cinematic fast food, not cinematic fine dining,” Dergarabedian says. These films are “generally risk-averse, and that has tended to work. A lot of known IP, whether it’s X-Men or Pirates Of The Caribbean, or even known characters like Lilo and Stitch. It’s a hedge against failure.”
Immediately after Jedi, sequels, particularly threequels, became fixtures of the holiday. After all, if people showed up for part two, they’ll probably feel obligated to return. Rambo III, Indiana Jones And The Last Crusade, Back To The Future III, Alien 3, and Beverly Hills Cop 3 all staked their claim on the holiday. Live-action adaptations of animated TV shows were also abundant, with The Flintstones and Casper both opening big. To that end, another movie based on a TV show, 1996’s Mission: Impossible, blew the holiday wide open with a record-breaking $45 million opening weekend on more than 3,000 screens. It held the title for one year, defeated by The Lost World: Jurassic Park. When Star Wars returned to theaters in 1999, Memorial Day remained its home. All three prequels opened the week before the holiday, giving Anakin a two-week Force-chokehold on the box office.
Throughout the 2000s, the Memorial Day box office offered a diverse slate of sequels, family films, and star-driven event movies. Once Disney acquired Marvel in 2009 and Lucasfilm in 2012, the studio began to cannibalize the weekend, competing with itself for space. Punting Star Wars: The Force Awakens to December 2015, a more prestigious and awards-friendly release date, Disney started using Memorial Day for its brand-revitalizing remakes and spin-offs. That year, instead of Star Wars, it picked the based-on-a-theme-park-area sci-fi adventure Tomorrowland for its Memorial tentpole, which became one of the studio’s most notorious recent flops.
Nevertheless, Disney remained committed to Star Wars in December. “A habit is a habit for a reason, and Hollywood is superstitious about release days,” Dergarabedian says. They had reason to feel that way. After three successful Star Wars films in December, the studio released Solo: A Star Wars Story in early summer, resulting in the series’ financial nadir. By then, the studio had begun to acquire 20th Century Fox, further complicating its own release schedule. Star Wars would stay in December, and Indiana Jones And The Dial Of Destiny would move to late June, making Dial the first Indy not released on Memorial Day. Instead, Disney opted to release The Little Mermaid that weekend.
The Mandalorian And Grogu is another hedge against failure. It’s a Star Wars movie opening when Star Wars movies should, but rather than the movie guiding where blockbusters will go, it’s following the path that Disney constructed in Solo‘s wake, squashing the franchise into the same kind of cinematic fast food as the studio’s live-action remakes. Those remakes, even billion-dollar grossers from a year ago, like Lilo & Stitch, are memory-holed money grabs, simply pointing audiences back to the versions that the merchandise already favors. The Mandalorian And Grogu is optimized for the same thing. Replacing endless Star Wars debates and culture wars with an inoffensive extended episode of a TV show that neither disrupts nor adds to lore is as risk-averse as it gets. And if you don’t like it, you’ve already got Mandalorian at home.
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