Most people think they know Star Wars. They know the Death Star. They know Darth Vader. They know the moment Luke Skywalker turns off his targeting computer and trusts the Force instead. But here is what almost no one talks about: the story did not end when the second Death Star exploded above Endor. It did not end when the Ewoks danced, and the ghosts of Anakin, Yoda, and Obi-Wan smiled into the firelight. That was not a conclusion. That was a door hanging open. And walking through that door, years later, with a jet pack and a helmet that never comes off, is a man named Din Djarin. Beside him, floating in a pram, green ears shaking, is the most beloved creature in modern Star Wars history.
Before you sit in that theater on May 22, 2026, for Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu, you need to understand exactly where this story sits. Not just emotionally but historically. Because the timeline is not just a background detail, it is the entire point. It tells you what kind of galaxy Din and Grogu are walking through, what is already lost, what is still fragile, and what is quietly, terrifyingly growing in the dark. So let us go through this together, step by step, from the very beginning of the Star Wars timeline to the exact moment where this movie lives.
The Measurement of Time in a Galaxy Far, Far Away
First, a quick lesson, because it genuinely matters. The Star Wars universe does not measure time the way we do. There is no AD or BC. Instead, every year is measured by its distance from one single event: the Battle of Yavin. That is the battle at the end of A New Hope, the one where Luke blew up the first Death Star and the Rebel Alliance exhaled for the first time in years. Everything before that battle is measured in BBY, Before the Battle of Yavin. Everything after is ABY, After the Battle of Yavin. Think of it as the galaxy's reset clock. The moment the Death Star died, history split into before and after.
The prequel trilogy, Episodes I through III, all take place in the BBY territory. The Clone Wars, Order 66, and the fall of Anakin Skywalker—all of it happens before that measurement switch. The original trilogy, Episodes IV through VI, straddles that line. A New Hope is 0 ABY. The Empire Strikes Back is 3 ABY. Return of the Jedi is 4 ABY. That last number is important. 4 ABY. Remember it.
The Moment the Empire Died (Or Seemed To)
Return of the Jedi is 4 ABY. He is good at it — his weapon as reliable as any neopixel lightsaber wielded by a Jedi — and then a bounty changes everything. Darth Vader dies as Anakin Skywalker. The second Death Star explodes. Across the galaxy, people pour into the streets on Bespin, Tatooine, Coruscant, and Endor's moon to celebrate. But here is what the films never showed you; the books and shows and canon have since stepped in. The Empire did not simply switch off. It did not dissolve overnight like a bad dream. The Imperial military was enormous. It spanned star systems.It had fleets, armies, governors, warlords, admirals, and commanders — including feared dark side hunters like the Star Wars Inquisitors — who had no intention of accepting defeat just because their emperor was dead.
What followed was not peace. What followed was a brutal, rough cleaning operation that took years. The New Republic, which is what the Rebel Alliance became after Endor, had to fight battle after battle to break down the Imperial machine piece by piece. The crucial moment came at the Battle of Jakku, which takes place in 5 ABY, one full year after Return of the Jedi. That is the battle that broke the Empire's spine. The Imperial Remnant signed the Galactic Concordance, a formal surrender, and what remained of the Empire scattered into the Outer Rim. That is the world Din Djarin was born into. A galaxy still bleeding from the Empire's collapse, still learning what it meant to be free.
The Mandalorian Begins: 9 ABY
The first season of The Mandalorian picks up in 9 ABY, five years after the Battle of Endor. Five years is not a long time when you are trying to rebuild a civilization from scratch. The New Republic exists, but it is young and uncertain. It has moved its capital frequently, trying not to repeat the Empire's mistake of putting all power in one place. It has a senate. It has ideals. It has pilots, diplomats, and bureaucrats. What it struggles with is the Outer Rim, those wild, lawless stretches of space far from the New Republic's reach, where the old Imperial Remnant still operates, where crime syndicates fill the power vacuum, and where a Mandalorian bounty hunter takes jobs to survive and follows a creed so strict he has not shown his face to another living being in years.
The galaxy in Season 1 feels like the American frontier after a war. The central government exists, but out here, in the dust and the dark, the rules are different. Din Djarin lives in that space. He is good at it. And then a bounty changes everything. The target is not a person. It is a child, fifty years old, barely bigger than a toddler, with enormous green ears and eyes that hold something ancient and impossible — a Force sensitivity rare even among legendary beings like Maris Brood.The target is Grogu. From that moment, the whole story shifts.
Seasons 1 Through 3: A Year That Changed Everything
Here is something that genuinely surprises people when they first learn it. According to the official Star Wars: Timelines book, all three seasons of The Mandalorian, including Din's travels across the Outer Rim, the quest to find a Jedi for Grogu, the Book of Boba Fett episodes where Grogu returns to Din, and the entire restoration of Mandalore in Season 3, all take place within roughly the same year. We are still in 9 ABY territory, possibly moving into 10 ABY.
It is a stunning amount of story compressed into a very short span of time. In that single year, Grogu went from being a hunted resource to an adopted son. Din went from being a solitary armed robber who followed the creed without question to a man who broke the creed, faced consequences, sought redemption, and emerged on the other side as something harder to categorize.
By the end of Season 3, at approximately 9 to 10 ABY, here is where the galaxy stands. Mandalore has been reclaimed. Bo-Katan Kryze has led her people back to their home planet, and Din stood at her side through it. Moff Gideon, the Imperial warlord who had been the central threat of the entire series, is dead. The Darksaber, the symbol of Mandalorian leadership, is gone. And Din Djarin, having been redeemed by the Armorer after removing his helmet, has officially adopted Grogu as his heir and agreed to work for the New Republic. It looks like a resolution. It is actually a new beginning.
The Wider Mandoverse: Ahsoka and the Shadow Growing in the East
Before we get to Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu, the movie, you need to know what else was happening in 9 ABY. Because the Star Wars timeline in this era is not just the story of Din and Grogu, it is a web of connected stories, and the most important thread running through all of them is a name spoken in the shadows. Thrawn. Grand Admiral Thrawn, the most dangerous military mind the Empire ever produced, was lost before the Battle of Endor. He was pulled into deep space by a Force-wielding navigator named Ezra Bridger. Both of them disappeared, and for years, the Rebel Alliance, then the New Republic, believed the threat was gone.
We learned they were wrong in Ahsoka Season 1, which also occurs in 9 ABY. Thrawn was back. He came back from a far, alien galaxy called Peridea, aboard a Star Destroyer, commanded by a dead man, with something darker and stranger than the New Republic was ready for. And Ahsoka Tano, the former Jedi who had hunted him for years, found herself trapped in the far-off galaxy as Thrawn escaped back to the known galaxy.
We can see the invisible pressure hanging over everything in the post-Jedi era. The New Republic does not fully understand yet what has come back. They are still fighting scattered warlords and cleaning up Imperial remnants. They do not know that behind all of it, coordinating, watching, and planning, is the one imperial commander who never fought with brute Force. Thrawn wins with patience and strategy and the kind of long-term thinking that takes years to reveal itself. That is the galaxy Din Djarin and Grogu are stepping into when the movie begins.
The Mandalorian and Grogu Movie: 12 to 13 ABY (Approximately)
Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu is set after Season 3, taking us further along the timeline, likely into the 12 or 13 ABY range, though Lucasfilm has not confirmed the exact year. What we do know is that it sits firmly in the post-Return of the Jedi era, well after Endor, well after Jakku, and well before the emergence of the First Order and the events of the sequel trilogy. That gap matters more than people realize. The Force Awakens is set in 34 ABY. That means this movie sits approximately 20 to 22 years before Ben Solo becomes Kylo Ren. Twenty years. An entire generation. The children born in the year Din Djarin first found Grogu would be young adults by the time the First Order rises.
This placement is deliberate and smart. Jon Favreau has spoken about wanting the film to function as a fresh entry point, something new viewers who have never seen the show or the older films could walk into and understand. Setting it this far from both the original trilogy's ending and the sequel trilogy's beginning gives the story room to breathe. It is not carried down by what came before or rushed toward what comes next. It is its own moment in the galaxy's history.
The New Republic in 12 to 13 ABY is more established than it was in Season 1, but it is also more comfortable. It believes the Empire is broken. It does not see the coordination happening behind the scenes between the scattered Imperial Remnant groups. It does not know what Thrawn is building. In that blind spot, warlords still operate. They still have AT-ATs. They still have Star Destroyers in remote systems. And they still have the will to make the Empire live again. The New Republic's answer to this problem is to enlist people who know the Outer Rim. People who know how the underworld operates. People like Din Djarin.
The Mandalorian Story Arc: From Lone Wolf to Father to Soldier
The Mandalorian storyline, from its first episode to this movie, is one of the most quietly extreme character plots in the franchise's history. And understanding where it sits on the timeline makes it richer. In 9 ABY, Din Djarin was a man defined entirely by rules. The creed was his identity. He did not show his face. He did not form attachments. He took the job, got paid, and moved on. Grogu destroyed all of it, one episode at a time. By the end of Season 3, Din is a different person, not because he abandoned his identity, but because he redefined it.Din's journey echoes the quiet conviction of legendary Jedi like Qui-Gon Jinn — men who followed their own moral compass when the institutions around them failed. He is still Mandalorian. He is also a father. He is also, somewhat unwillingly, an agent of the New Republic.
The movie, set years later, takes that evolution and asks the next question. Who is Din Djarin now that he has everything he once said he did not need? He has purpose. He has a son. He has belonging. And now the New Republic is asking him to use everything he is, bounty hunter, Mandalorian, and father, for the greater good of a galaxy that is more fragile than it looks. Pedro Pascal described this as Din getting to combine his skills with doing what he knows is right. That is a clean way of saying the character has grown into his own ethical standards. He is no longer just following orders, nor the creed, nor anyone else's. He is making choices.
What This Era Means for the Star Wars Universe
The movie is the part of the timeline that is most important to me, and I think it should be to you as well. The post-Jedi era, the New Republic era, this specific window of time between 4 ABY and 34 ABY, is thirty years of Star Wars history that the films almost entirely skipped. The original trilogy ended. The sequel trilogy jumped forward three decades. And in those three decades, the Galactic Civil War came down, an entire generation grew up, a New Republic rose and began to figure out the same political failures that doomed the Old Republic, and the seeds of the First Order were quietly planted.
Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu are living inside that gap. It is showing us what the galaxy looked like during those in-between decades. Not the glory of the Rebellion's victory. Not the horror of the First Order's rise. The complicated, messy, hopeful, dangerous middle. That is where the best stories live. Not in the moments of clear victory or obvious disaster. In the years where people are trying, where the future is genuinely uncertain, where a man in Mandalorian armor and a fifty-year-old green child are flying through the Outer Rim in a rebuilt Razor Crest, taking missions they believe in, fighting enemies they understand, and being held together by a bond that neither of them has any words for.
The Bridge Between Worlds
The post-Jedi era Star Wars timeline, the specific stretch from 9 ABY onward that this movie occupies, is a bridge. On one side is everything the original trilogy fought for. On the other side is everything the sequel trilogy mourns. And right in the middle, walking across that bridge in Beskar armor, carrying a child who might be the most Force-sensitive being alive, is Din Djarin — a warrior whose Beskar armor gleams beside a blade whose kyber crystal holds the weight of every choice he has made.He does not know he is a bridge. He knows he has a job to do and a kid to protect.
That is what makes this story work. The timeline does not feel like a history lesson when you are watching it through Din Djarin and Grogu's eyes. It feels like right now. It feels like two people dealing with an uncertain world, trying to do the right thing, making it up as they go. The galaxy survived the Empire once. It is about to find out whether it learned anything from the experience. On May 22, 2026, you will want to be there.
