'Mandalorian and Grogu' premieres and ... hello?

There’s a new Star Wars movie opening tonight!

Hello?

Hellooooo?

Oh, I guess we’re not quite as fired up as we were in 2015, when Luke moved to Ireland after his nephew turned out to be a bit of a dick and later killed Luke’s best buddy, who hung out with the big hairy guy and was married to his sister, who made out with her brother, which everyone thought was cool until it was gross.

Disney gave George Lucas $4.05 billion for that laser-guided soap opera. Then Disney missed the point, panicked, and started making more movies and TV shows than anyone can keep track of to get their money back.

Aside from Lucas’ brilliant move of keeping all the merch rights in 1977, pre-Disney Star Wars wasn’t about money. Disney missed that part, and I’m not sure the new film shows the Mouse is any closer to getting it, or we’d be going to a live-action Darth Maul movie tonight.

Tonight we get The Mandalorian and Grogu, the first Star Wars movie in theaters since 2019. And perhaps the first Star Wars movie in theaters about which few seem to care.

And the movie geeks are thirsty for something about which to get excited. They want to love a new Star Wars movie.

But a handsome guy hiding in a helmet who adopted a magic possum?

I hope I’m wrong. Of course, it’ll make money. But what was the last movie the fantasy geeks lined up for? Nothing Marvel-related since 2019. Both Marvel and Disney now do their best new work on TV. Disney actually remembered character and story development in making Andor, by far its best TV series.

It’s not enough. Disney had no plan a decade ago, and I’m not sure that’s changed. They were like a hyperactive little kid who found the keys to a jet-powered speedboat when his parents were gone all afternoon. They started that sucker and threw down the throttle before anyone had any idea where they were going.

Their first movie, 2015’s “Star Wars: We Copied The First One” was a hit, of course. It seemed great at the time. There was no Jar-Jar Binks, Han Solo came back, and there was a bad guy in a mask with a new fuzzy red lightsaber that sounded like sizzling bacon.

He also whined a lot and got beat up by a girl who barely knew how to turn on a lightsaber.

There went the scary villain.

Then Disney completely turned the franchise over to a new guy (Rian Johnson), who brought a new bad guy with no backstory and looked like ET’s much-taller older brother with bad skin from his meth addiction.

Johnson brought back a depressed Luke and tried making us love these weird Irish penguins. But not before deciding Luke should milk an Irish sea cow and drink it, so instead of spending money on penguin action figures, we associated everything from Space Ireland with gagging in the theater.

Disney realized that was even grosser than incest, killed off ET Methhead, re-hired the first director (J.J. Abrams), who said screw it, we’re in a hurry, let’s hire an old villain and pretend no one noticed him building 950,000 star destroyers the past 37 years. And let’s kill the whiney guy just as he gets interesting.

I know Carrie Fisher’s death changed the whole film. But Disney still felt like they had to hurry because the shareholders wouldn’t like all those Star Wars rides opening without a movie to explain them.

We saw too much, too fast. It’s like looking too hard at too many details on “The Pirates of the Carribean” … right before you fall out of the boat, start screaming, and they turn on the lights and ban you from Disneyland.

I’m not saying it happened to me.

Of course, Disney gets credit for the excellent Rogue One, and was smart enough to spin off one of its characters into Andor. I also think the Han Solo movie was much better than people thought (I so wanted a Darth Maul spinoff, and not just a cartoon). So there’s that.

I’ll still go see it. But the magic space possum better do something exciting.

My daughters have a dad to feed, so please consider paying $8 a month to read these columns. Find more nonsense in Tony’s book “Lying Drunk,” available from Barnes & Noble at https://bit.ly/46xoaJJ or Amazon at https://a.co/d/cYNCUPp).