They Did It Again: This Is Boba Fett's Movie

Book of Boba Fett Flopped, Its Best Parts Were Mando's

The data made executives believe a lie: people want Mando, not Boba.

Step one of the motive: the numbers told them to drop Boba

The Book of Boba Fett sat in the mid-60s on Rotten Tomatoes and was, for a stretch, the lowest-rated live-action Star Wars show on the platform. And even more interesting, the strongest episodes were the two that abandoned Boba to go tell Mando's story. A Disney executive sees this, and thinks exactly one thing: The audience wants Mando, not Boba. So you stop greenlighting Boba projects. But you do not throw away the plots you already wrote. You simply recast them with Mando.

Then Mando's Own Show Got Boring

Season 3 was his lowest-rated season, and not by a little.

they needed an injection of 'classic Mando'

Mando Season 3 fell to roughly 84 percent with critics, a series low, and the audience score cratered into the 50s, with complaints about aimless side-quests and a show that had drifted away from bounty hunting into Bo-Katan politics. The franchise needed something that felt like classic Mando again. Some seedy underworld, monster-of-the-week bounty hunting. Which is to say, it needed something that felt like classic Boba Fett. And a whole season of Boba Fett was already sitting in a drawer.

A Whole season of Boba, gathering dust in a Drawer

Never greenlit, never cancelled. Just an unresolved plot.

Step three: the raw material was right there

The Book of Boba Fett Season 2 was never greenlit and never officially cancelled. Just silence. But Season 1 spent its whole run seeding a Season 2: the escalation with the Hutt Twins and the fate of Jabba's scattered empire.

The Twins literally showed up, threatened Boba, sent a Wookiee to kill him, then announced they were leaving Tatooine, for now. That is the most obvious 'to be continued' in Star Wars. Story ideas do not evaporate at a studio. A homeless, half-built season is precisely the raw material a studio raids when a movie suddenly needs a plot on a deadline.

Favreau: The Film 'Forced Me to Create a New Story'

The Thrawn plot was thrown out. A new one was bolted on, fast.

Step four: by their own account, they scrapped the plot and grabbed another

Favreau and Filoni had already written a Mandalorian Season 4 centered on Grand Admiral Thrawn, designed to set up Ahsoka Season 2. When the show was converted to a film, Favreau told SFX Magazine that those scripts could not simply be adapted, they had too many characters and assumed you had seen everything on Disney+. Going from a season to a film, in his own words, 'forced him to create a new story.'

We are just asking where that new story came from. The Thrawn plot is out. A brand-new plot was bolted on under deadline, and it just so happens to be a Hutt-empire succession war. Where had a Hutt-empire succession war recently been left unfinished? Exactly.

The Third Name on the Poster Wrote Every Episode of Boba Fett

Noah Kloor. Not a Mando writer. The Book of Boba Fett's staff writer.

The smoking gun is in the credits

Look at who got top billing on the screenplay: Jon Favreau, Dave Filoni, and a third name, Noah Kloor. Who is Noah Kloor? Maybe you expect him to be a Mandalorian writer? Nope. He wrote exactly one episode of Mandalorian Season 3, a poorly received one that barely featured Mando.

But look again, it turns out he was staff writer on The Book of Boba Fett, with writing credit on every single episode. They handed the Mandalorian's movie to the man who wrote Boba Fett's show. If this were really a Mandalorian story, why is the Boba Fett writer getting top billing?

The Twins Are Boba's Villains. Period.

Din Djarin has zero history with them. They came for Jabba's (now Fett's) throne.

The film's main villains were built to fight Boba, not Mando

The Hutt Twins debuted in The Book of Boba Fett, traveling to Mos Espa to claim Jabba's territory from Boba, sending Wookie assassin Black Krrsantan to assassinate him, then withdrawing from Tatooine with the grudge unresolved. The textbook 'we will be back' villain exit. In the movie they are the primary antagonists. But their opponent is suddenly Mando, a man who has never met them. Their entire dramatic purpose, a blood grudge over Jabba's empire, only pays off if pitted against the man who actually took Jabba's throne. That man is Boba.

The Whole Movie Is About Jabba's Empire

Grogu, Ahsoka, Mandalore? None of them are here. Just Hutts, thrones, and succession.

Strip out the plot and the elements are 100% Boba

Forget plot for a second. In Disney's Star Wars, what makes a story Boba Fett? Jabba, Hutts, crime syndicates, successions, and deciding who runs the underworld. What makes a story Mandalorian? Grogu, Ahsoka, Luke, the Darksaber, Mandalore, Bo-Katan. Now count what this movie contains. Of the Mandalorian elements: just Grogu (barely.) Of the Boba elements: all of them.

The entire point of this film is rescuing Rotta and deciding the fate of the Hutt Syndicate. Boba served Jabba, died on Jabba's sail barge, rose from the dead to sit on Jabba's throne, and spent a whole series consolidating Jabba's holdings. This movie is Boba's world. Mando is a tourist in it.

Boba Never Wanted to BE a Crime Lord. He Wanted to Restore One.

This is the keystone: it fixes everything broken about Boba's Season 1.

The 'restore the heir' engine answers the questions that broke Boba's show

The single biggest complaint about The Book of Boba Fett was simple. Why is Boba Fett, who says outright 'I am not a bounty hunter,' trying to become a crime lord he clearly does not want to be?

This movie answers it. Boba was never trying to own the syndicate. He is a bounty hunter who thrives in a stable balance of power, a galaxy with a powerful patron who trusts him, grants him autonomy, and pays a premium. Jabba's death threw all of that out of whack. So Boba kills Bib, seizes the throne, and consolidates Jabba's leaderless holdings before the Pykes or the Twins can carve them up, not out of ambition, but to hold the empire in trust.

The final step was always to find Jabba's son and restore him to power, buying himself a permanent seat as the trusted hunter of the brand new mob boss. Watch the movie and you are watching the back half of that exact plan, with Mando's face glued on.

Jabba's Heir Is Voiced by a Line Cook

Jeremy Allen White from 'The Bear,' got the role through a chef connection.

The Bear, behind the Hutt throne

Rotta the Hutt is voiced by Jeremy Allen White, the star of The Bear. Per The Hollywood Reporter, he landed the role partly through a cooking connection with Jon Favreau, who is himself a serious food guy. So the heir to Jabba's criminal empire is played by television's most famous line cook.

The Gladiator Pit Is Ripped From a Canon Boba Comic

Disguised, forced into a death-pit, fighting for freedom. That already happened. To Boba.

it is a near-direct adaptation

In War of the Bounty Hunters: Alpha, the 2021 Marvel comic, Boba is forced to fight in a gladiatorial death-pit on Nar Shaddaa. To hide his identity he sprays his armor black, takes his father's name 'Jango,' gets billed as the 'Beskar Brawler,' and wins fight after fight until coming up against a monstrous, spider-like pit warrior. In the movie, Mando is thrown into Janu's arena announced as 'a rare Mandalorian specimen,' forced to fight for his freedom, and survives a final death-match. A Mandalorian-armored bounty hunter, forced into a gladiator pit, fighting round after round of monsters to win his freedom, is a beat that already happened to Boba, in canon, two years before this movie. The film did not invent this scene. It re-heated it like yesterday's leftovers.

The Arena Floor Is the 1977 Holochess Board

Every monster is a Dejarik piece, and the big one does its signature move.

The best Easter egg in the movie is 50 years old

Look at the arena floor in the gladiator scene: it is tiled exactly like the holochess board, Dejarik, from the very first Star Wars in 1977. And the creatures released to kill Mando and Rotta are the holochess pieces, making their first appearances as real beasts.

The hulking one, the Mantellian Savrip, even performs its signature move from A New Hope's holochess game! It walks over to a smaller monster, picks it up, and slowly sets it back down, killing it instantly. For decades fans thought that was just clumsy stop-motion. Turns out, it's just how the creature kills! A 50-year-old Star Wars deep cut, perfectly executed.

The New Republic Wrapper Is the Visible Seam

Pull this thread and the whole 'why is Mando even here' problem unravels.

This is the duct tape holding two worlds together

The setup: Mando works for the New Republic chasing neo-imperial warlords, and to get intel on the next imperial he takes a job, brokered with the Hutt Twins, to 'rescue' Jabba's son Rotta... From the imperial warlord whose whereabouts will be his payment... Hold on, does that make any sense at all?

Why is the fledgling New Republic, born from a war against tyranny, cutting deals with literal crime lords and running errands that decide who runs the galaxy's mafia? They take the word of slug gangsters and dispatch an agent to fetch a Hutt heir, a job that turns out to be making them complicit to murder. Either they blindly believed the criminal cartel and nearly became accessory to an assassination, or they knew and did it anyway. Pick your poison.

Every one of these holes vanishes the instant you put Boba in the pilot's seat. A fresh Daimyo taking Jabba's throne for himself and already wrapped up in the Twins' infighting has every reason to be here. The New Republic does not. This is not plot. It is a desperate contrivance to feebly connect Mando to Boba's world, in the hopes that fans don't notice the blatant swap.

"I Don't Deal With Hutts"

Mando's own line, the instant he's sent to meet the Twins.

The movie tells on itself in one line

When the New Republic officer tells Mando to go deal with the Twins, his first reaction is to say, flatly, that he does not deal with Hutts. The movie has to manufacture a reason to drag him into a Hutt war, because he has no legitimate reason to be here at all.

Listen to how the plot actually sounds out loud: Mando is tracking imperial officers, and oh, that gladiator boss is the imperial officer we're looking for, but we don't know that, and now we are working for the Hutts for some reason, and tracking down Jabba's son for some reason, who was kidnapped by the imperial officer for some reason, and suddenly we're taking down the Twins for some reason! The poor stitching shows on every seam. Boba would need none of it.

You Could Delete the Father-Son Subplot and Nothing Changes

The one genuinely Mando part of the movie is a passenger, not the pilot.

Grogu lifts right out of the movie

Fatherhood is core Mando and Grogu, and this movie had an entire subplot dedicated to it, so the movie must be really truly theirs.

But wait, look at it again. The Mando-and-Grogu material in this movie is not load-bearing. Lift the entire father and son subplot out and the Hutt-succession plot proceeds completely unchanged.

Look at how it is shoehorned in. A skyscraper-sized snake-dragon, a thing that obviously kills by crushing and swallowing, is revealed to also be venomous for some reason, purely so Din can get poisoned and Grogu can have a 'save dad' moment. The cure? A deus ex machina swamp hermit who materializes out of the swamp, hands over a magic antidote, and is never seen or mentioned again. Crisis introduced, crisis resolved, crisis forgotten. And then the movie continues.

It is entirely self-contained. That is not a theme, that is a bad coat of paint. And it proves there is an old rusting chassis underneath.

These Are the Same Fingerprints as Last Time

Filoni co-wrote it, and re-skinning used plots is exactly his go-to.

We already caught him doing this before

In our previous episode we argued that when Filoni runs out of ideas, he re-skins an old fan-favorite arc instead of building a new one. We already made the case that The Book of Boba Fett is a beat-for-beat re-run of his own Darth Maul plot. Popular villain falls to his death, survives implausibly, is healed by a secretive society, becomes a crime lord, tactlessly seizes an existing syndicate, recruits a gang of colorful expendables. Now look at The Mandalorian & Grogu. Filoni is doing it again, but this time he's taking Boba Fett's own story and handing it to Mando on a silver platter.

The Rival Hunter Is 'Cad Bane: The Rerun'

Every Boba climax Filoni touches ends in a duel with a Filoni original.

When in doubt, cast a Filoni original instead of the fans want

Every Boba climax Filoni touches ends in a one-on-one with a rival hunter. The planned Cad Bane finale of The Clone Wars, then the Western showdown with Cad Bane in The Book of Boba Fett. And now this movie reruns the beat exactly, a rival bounty hunter runs the hero down and hauls him off to the Hutts. And it casts the slot with Embo, another Filoni Clone Wars creation. Either Embo is simply where a returning Cad Bane would have gone (Star Wars characters never stay dead), or he is Cad Bane with a new hat. Either way it is Filoni reaching for his own creations instead of the classic original trilogy bounty hunters that fans actually want.

Filoni Already Rescued This Exact Hutt in 2008

Rotta is 'Stinky,' the Huttlet from the Clone Wars movie. Now rescued a second time.

The same Hutt, kidnapped in two different decades

Rescuing a kidnapped Hutt heir is a well Filoni has drawn from before. The entire plot of the 2008 Clone Wars film is Anakin and Ahsoka rescuing Jabba's kidnapped son, Rotta the Huttlet, the one Ahsoka nicknamed 'Stinky.' This is the same Hutt. Rotta has now been rescued by a Jedi and a Mandalorian in two different decades, in two different Filoni-co-written stories. We're recycling recycled content. At this point, I guess getting kidnapped is just Rotta's hobby.

The Sarlacc's 'Thousand Years' Was Just a Hutt Saying 'Forever'

C-3PO translated it literally. He missed the nuance.

A throwaway line quietly fixes a 40-year-old joke

In Return of the Jedi, Jabba sentences our heroes to be slowly digested in the Sarlacc over a thousand years. Fans tied themselves in knots explaining how the Sarlacc keeps you alive that long. This movie offers a better answer, almost in passing: when a Hutt threatens Rotta with suffering for a thousand years, you realize that is just how Hutts talk. They are so long-lived that 'a thousand years' is simply their phrase for 'the rest of your life.' Jabba was not promising mystical torture. C-3PO, a famously literal protocol droid, just translated the figure of speech word for word and missed the nuance. A perfect explanation.