‘The Book of Boba Fett’: What Went Wrong?

Star Wars fans had high hopes for The Book of Boba Fett. Kinda like the titular bounty hunter, the Disney+ series stirred up a lot of presumptions and expectations off of very little information. For one thing, the series would finally make good on a nearly 20-year promise to devote a whole live-action Star Wars show to the galaxy’s criminal underworld. Even more importantly, the series would finally give Boba Fett a spotlight proportional to his enduring and overwhelming popularity. And on top of that, the show would be spearheaded by Robert Rodriguez, the run and gun director who brought Boba Fett roaring to life in The Mandalorian Season 2. Seriously — Star Wars fans waited over 40 years for this series.

So… what happened?

To speak subjectively, and to speak as one of those fans who was so obsessed with Boba Fett that he had a life-size cardboard cutout of the character in his middle school bedroom, my high hopes weren’t really met. And from my general perusal of Twitter and convos with the Star Wars fans in my life, I don’t think I’m alone.

There is a shocking disconnect on Rotten Tomatoes, where the Season 1 rating of 82% is way higher than the audience score (62%, based on 1,928 votes). Compare that to The Mandalorian, a series with an overall 93% critical score and a 91% audience score. That’s… rough.

The lukewarm response to The Book of Boba Fett extends beyond what Twitter, critics, and the people who spend their time leaving comments on Rotten Tomatoes had to say. The Google Trends results for the series show that it never even came close to matching the search traffic heights of The Mandalorian Seasons 1 and 2.

And if you zoom in and compare the episode by episode search interest, you’ll see that The Book of Boba Fett didn’t start commanding attention until it unexpectedly spent two weeks being The Mandalorian Season 2.5.

But just because people were freaking out about the return of Din Djarin, Amy Sedaris, Ahsoka Tano, Grogu, and creepy CG Luke Skywalker doesn’t mean that The Book of Boba Fett drove the pop culture conversation over the past six weeks. Just compare Boba Fett to the other top shows of 2022 — HBO’s Euphoria, Netflix’s Cobra Kai, and Paramount+’s 1883.

While The Book of Boba Fett is pretty much tied with 1883, Euphoria’s teens totally clown on Boba’s Teenage Cyborg Biker Youths every single week. And even Cobra Kai, which didn’t have a weekly release, managed to outdo the first few episodes of The Book of Boba Fett. All this being said, Boba Fett’s fate wasn’t so bleak when measured by Nielsen; the series had a strong debut and has been in the top 10 for two weeks. Still, that just proves that people are streaming The Book of Boba Fett, not necessarily enjoying or engaging with The Book of Boba Fett.

So why did the series that casual fans initially thought would star Boba Fett fly circles around a show that actually starred Boba Fett? The problem may lie with Boba Fett himself — through no fault of Temuera Morrison, mind you!

Fett’s lack of character from the original trilogy created a hole that no performance could ever fill. Fans have had 40 years to come up with their own versions of who Boba Fett is beyond a badass helmet (because that’s all he was in those movies!). On top of that, there were fans who grew attached to Boba Fett’s characterization in the previous expanded universe, in stories that are now non-canonical and replaced with Disney’s Fett. Temuera Morrison — who, mind you, was introduced as Jango Fett (and ergo Boba Fett) by George Lucas himself in 2002’s Attack of the Clones — had to please every single Boba Fett fan who has ever thought about what that guy was like under the helmet.

And it turns out that the guy under the helmet was, uh, a grumbly 60-year-old man who seems happier just chillin’ on Tatooine and vibin’ with Tuskens than being a kick ass bounty hunter.

This is the other problem with The Book of Boba Fett: not only was this Boba Fett a mismatch for probably every single fan’s expectations, he didn’t even really match the Boba Fett that we watched in The Mandalorian Season 2. That Boba Fett was very much a warrior, a one-man army capable of wrecking an entire squad of stormtroopers. Just by virtue of being so brutal, that Boba Fett had to have met a lot of fans’ hopes.

But the Fett who takes over for Jabba and moves in on territory run by the crime families of Mos Espa is not that Fett. He’s weakened and his personality ranges from stoic to surprisingly amiable. It was a weird choice.

And that was far from the only weird choice. As I detailed at length elsewhere, The Book of Boba Fett‘s detour into The Mandalorian just highlighted everything wrong with the show. In the four episodes before Din Djarin’s welcome return, we learned next to nothing new about Fett or Fennec Shand (Ming-Na Wen) and no dynamic developed between them or any of the regular characters. In fact, the regulars were predominantly siloed off in their own storylines, preventing any interesting interplay from occurring until Din Djarin had to hear about Peli Motto’s love life.

There is a good series starring a wisened Boba Fett and an ice cold Fennec Shand if they are forced to, I don’t know, show cool cyborg teen Drash (Sophie Thatcher) the ropes, get intel from the glamorous Garsa Fwip (the fantastic, and totally squandered, Jennifer Beals), constantly seek repairs from the batty Peli Motto (Sedaris), keep their torture droid (Matt f’ing Berry) from torturing everyone, stop Black Krrsantan (Carey Jones) from getting trashed and ripping people apart — do you see where this series could have gone?

But that’s what this series could have been. Looking at what the series actually was makes us wonder, “How did this happen — no, literally, how did this happen? How did the team who gave us two slam-dunk seasons of The Mandalorian make this?” The only answer I could come up with is that maybe The Book of Boba Fett was never intended to be The Book of Boba Fett. Maybe series EP and writer Jon Favreau stretched one idea way, way too thin. Let’s try to set this timeline straight.

• October 2019: Production begins on The Mandalorian Season 2, which will introduce Boba Fett as played by Temuera Morrison
• ca. January 2020: Mandalorian EP Jon Favreau calls Robert Rodriguez in last-minute to direct the sixth episode of Season 2, “The Tragedy.” This episode marks Morrison’s full debut as Boba Fett. Rodriguez turns a 3-page fight scene into a 9-minute action sequence. Filming, as implied in Disney Gallery: The Mandalorian, blows everyone away.
• March 8, 2020: Filming wraps on Season 2, mere days before everything is shut down due to COVID-19.
• April 21, 2020: Sources say that Favreau is already writing The Mandalorian Season 3 and has been doing so for “a while.”
• October 30, 2020: The Mandalorian Season 2 premieres.
• November 5, 2020: Reports pop up that Mandalorian Season 3 or possibly a Boba Fett spinoff will start production in late November. We now know that this report was about The Book of Boba Fett which, as I’ll soon point out, was being disguised as The Mandalorian Season 3.
• Late November 2020: The Book of Boba Fett begins production with pretty much the entire cast and crew believing that they are working on The Mandalorian Season 3. The scripts are even numbered as such, with 301, 302, 303, etc.
• December 4, 2020: “The Tragedy” episode of The Mandalorian Season 2 airs on Disney+. It receives critical acclaim.
• December 10, 2020: During a Disney+ Investor Day presentation, Lucasfilm head Kathleen Kennedy states that the “next chapter” of The Mandalorian will premiere in December 2021. As we would later find out, Kennedy was referring to The Book of Boba Fett but kept the wording vague in order to keep the end of The Mandalorian Season 2 a surprise.
• Mid-December, 2020: Two weeks after production begins, the cast and crew find out that they are actually working on a spinoff titled The Book of Boba Fett. Ming-Na Wen also says that the series was referred to as The Mandalorian Season 2.5.
• December 18, 2020: The Mandalorian Season 2 finale airs, including a post-credits reveal that The Book of Boba Fett exists. This actually took a lot of people at Disney+ by surprise, as Favreau and Dave Filoni kept it a secret. Still, this announcement paired with Kennedy’s vague wording 8 days prior makes people wonder if The Book of Boba Fett actually is The Mandalorian Season 3.
• December 21, 2020: Seriously, this was so confusing that Jon Favreau had to go on Good Morning America and clearly state that Boba Fett is a spinoff and that The Mandalorian Season 3 is its own thing.
• December 29, 2020: Production in Los Angeles shuts down due to a COVID-19 surge. This presumably includes The Book of Boba Fett.
• January 18, 2021: Filming resumes on Disney productions, presumably including The Book of Boba Fett.
• June 8, 2021: Production wraps on The Book of Boba Fett.

So, what does all of this tell us? This wouldn’t be an exhaustive post about Star Wars if it did not include some behind-the-scenes conjecture.

So — it seems possible that Favreau began writing The Mandalorian Season 3 in early 2020, possibly around when “The Tragedy” was filmed. Seeing how well Rodriguez worked with Boba Fett and what Morrison brought to the screen, it’s possible he decided to bring Fett back for an episode or an arc in The Mandalorian Season 3; what we now know as The Book of Boba Fett probably did start as The Mandalorian Season 3, which would explain why so much crucial, crucial development for Din Djarin and Grogu occurs in a show that is not theirs.

Then COVID-19 happens. At this point, in the first few months of the pandemic, you gotta imagine there’s a lot of worry about what they’ll be able to film under safety protocols that probably haven’t even been defined yet. In order to keep The Mandalorian on track to debut in its usual year-end slot (albeit in 2022 rather than 2021), maybe they come up with a solution that will ensure they won’t have to sacrifice any of the storytelling we expect from Mando: take that Boba Fett episode/arc and stretch it out to fill 7 episodes instead of, say, 3. This task presumably falls to Favreau, who wrote the first four episodes, and Robert Rodriguez, a director known for shooting stuff under tight restrictions who also knocked a Boba episode outta orbit. Meanwhile, Dave Filoni — whose absence is definitely felt on Boba, IMO — can keep working on The Mandalorian Season 3 (and he can pop in and direct the episode he co-wrote, sure!).

So doing 4 episodes focused on Boba and Fennec on Tatooine pares down the cast and the locations considerably. Yeah, the whole show is shot on a closed-off soundstage nicknamed The Volume, but if they keep the whole thing on Tatooine they don’t have to build a lot of new props and masks or design a lot of new sets, physically or digitally. And y’know, maybe by the time they need to film Episodes 5 and 6, ones with larger casts and lots of new locations, maybe they’ll have a better hang on how to execute greatness under COVID.

That happens! And y’know, it wouldn’t surprise me if Episodes 5 and 6, the two Mandalorian-focused episodes, were originally drafts of the Season 3 premiere. And maybe Episode 7, the season finale, was originally the Boba/Din Djarin team-up episode that they planned to do in Season 3 all along.

So… uh, does that make sense? Did I solve the mystery?? This theory would explain a lot of the show’s shortcomings. The first four episodes did feel thin and rushed, almost like first drafts, compared to the muscular world-building of those first Mandalorian seasons. That could be explained by the lack of Filoni and the need to rush four scripts in order to make The Book of Boba Fett into a novel instead of a pamphlet. And this theory explains why we suddenly get two episodes that definitely feel like The Mandalorian Season 3, including one co-written by Filoni.

Overall, this experiment… well, it didn’t really work. It resulted in four episodes that had bright spots (who doesn’t love a train heist?), but were a step down from the quality we’ve come to expect. And then it gave us three good-to-great episodes… episodes of an entirely different show! We may never know the truth about what in the world happened behind-the-scenes, but one thing does seem clear: based on how good those two Mandalorian episodes were, I think it’s safe to assume that The Mandalorian Season 3 will be better than The Mandalorian Season 2.5.

Stream The Book of Boba Fett on Disney+