After a 6½-year hiatus from theaters, “Star Wars” returns to the big screen this weekend with “The Mandalorian and Grogu.”

This time around, however, the franchise faces a much different universe than it did in 2019 when the last film came out. For one, theatrical attendance has fallen dramatically since “Star Wars: Episode IX — The Rise of Skywalker” grossed more than $1 billion worldwide in the pre-pandemic days.

Then, there’s Walt Disney Co.-owned Lucasfilm’s own trajectory. In the last few years, new “Star Wars” stories have come only via streaming series on Disney+. And since the service debuted in 2019, the San Francisco-based studio pumped out 13 shows, including “The Mandalorian,” which inspired the film, though others received mixed reviews.

Lucasfilm is also under new leadership, as veterans Dave Filoni and Lynwen Brennan are now co-presidents after George Lucas’ handpicked successor, Kathleen Kennedy, stepped down this year.

It all adds up to a crucial question: Can the nearly 50-year-old franchise still delight its longtime fans, while bringing in new viewers to help it endure?

“There’s a lot riding on this,” said Jeff Bock, box-office analyst at entertainment data and research firm Exhibitor Relations. “It’s close to a make-or-break strategic test … just to see if the modern ‘Star Wars’ is still viable theatrically.”

“The Mandalorian and Grogu” is expected to gross around $80 million in the U.S. and Canada for the four-day Memorial Day weekend, according to studio estimates.

That would rank among some of the top openings this year, including Amazon MGM Studios’ “Project Hail Mary” ($80.5 million) and Disney-owned 20th Century Studios’ “The Devil Wears Prada 2” ($76.7 million). Another big sci-fi installment, Warner Bros. Pictures and Legendary Entertainment’s “Dune: Part Two,” opened to $82.5 million in 2024.

But for a “Star Wars” movie, that’s considered low.

2019’s “The Rise of Skywalker,” for example, opened to $177 million, with 2015’s “The Force Awakens” and 2017’s “The Last Jedi” each debuting to more than $200 million. The $84-million opening for 2018’s “Solo: A Star Wars Story” was considered a disappointment at the box office.

To be sure, theatrical expectations have changed dramatically since the pandemic, which altered moviegoers’ habits and trained many to wait and watch films at home.

“The Mandalorian and Grogu” also stems from a streaming series and does not continue the story line of the traditional “Star Wars” saga films that follow the Skywalker family. (The movie’s reported production budget of $166 million also makes it cheaper than its predecessors.)

And for Disney, box-office revenue will not be the only indicator of this film’s success.

The company expects the movie will boost other parts of its business, including streaming, its gaming collaboration with Fortnite and the all-important theme parks, where the film’s main characters appear at the Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge-themed land, and the Millennium Falcon: Smugglers Run ride has been overlaid with a “Mandalorian and Grogu” storyline.

Then of course, there’s merchandise. (Famously, fans rushed to buy items of Grogu — known colloquially as Baby Yoda — after “The Mandalorian” show debuted in 2019, though products didn’t arrive for months. Once available, 13 million Grogu toys were sold in the two years after they were released, Disney has said.)

“It’s not using cinema in the way ‘Star Wars’ used cinema before,” said Carmelo Esterrich, a professor at the school of communication and culture at Columbia College Chicago, who has written about how “Star Wars” is a reflection of American culture. “It’s using the franchise of television and the power machine of Grogu to bring it to the big screen.”

Grogu’s appeal highlights an important goal for the franchise: expanding beyond its original fan base to new audiences. Although “The Mandalorian and Grogu” builds on storylines from the streaming show, the film was designed to be accessible to viewers who had never watched it.

“I hope that our excitement and joy and love of ‘Star Wars’ translates to a new generation of fans seeing it, experiencing it the way we did for a long time,” director Jon Favreau told an audience in April at the CinemaCon trade conference during a presentation about Disney’s film lineup.

Early ticket sale tracking indicated strong interest from older men, who have historically been the core audience for “Star Wars” films. But after an extensive marketing campaign, Disney’s studio estimates now show audiences are younger, with more families and women represented.

To date, “The Mandalorian” is still the most popular Disney+ series. The show, which has run for three seasons, has won 15 Emmys, including for sound mixing and special effects. The critical and fan response, as well as the opportunity to explore new characters’ backstories, led Lucasfilm to choose this show to spin off into a movie, according to sources close to the studio.

Since the launch of the platform in November 2019, “The Mandalorian” and other “Star Wars” titles such as “The Acolyte” and the second season of “Andor” have seen relatively high audience demand, according to an analysis by Parrot Analytics, a firm that tracks streaming data. Despite several big hits, the average demand for live-action television series set in the galaxy far, far away have shown a slight downward trend over time.

In contrast, demand for live-action series from Disney-owned Marvel Studios has held stable since the premiere of its first streaming show, “WandaVision.” Though Marvel’s television offerings outnumber those of “Star Wars,” overall audience interest in the superhero shows is less than the biggest “Star Wars” hits and more comparable to some of Lucasfilm’s lesser-hyped titles, including “Skeleton Crew,” according to Parrot Analytics.

In the end, “The Mandalorian and Grogu” needs to keep audience interest in “Star Wars” on the big screen. Next year, Lucasfilm will release “Star Wars: Starfighter,” a film starring Ryan Gosling and directed by Shawn Levy of “Deadpool & Wolverine” that has generated great interest, particularly given Gosling’s turn in “Project Hail Mary.”

“This is a safe reentry point,” Bock of Exhibitor Relations said of “The Mandalorian” movie. “If Grogu can bring in the families and if ‘The Mandalorian’ continues to bring in the audiences of the old movies, maybe they can bridge these generations like classic ‘Star Wars’ once did.”

My inbox started filling up with the supposedly groundbreaking news early Tuesday, breathless news articles about a biological breakthrough that will allow a long-extinct giant bird to walk the Earth in modern times.

My reaction was this: “Not this same old yarn again.”

The company promoting its supposed breakthrough is Colossal Biosciences. That’s the Dallas business that created a PR-fueled frenzy last year with an announcement that it had brought the dire wolf back from extinction.

Its announcement caught fire because the dire wolf was a species depicted in the TV series “Game of Thrones” — indeed, part of the company’s publicity campaign featured a shot of George R.R. Martin, the author of the Game of Thrones books, cradling a fluffy wolf-like pup in his arms.

Colossal’s latest announcement was that it has hatched 26 chickens in an “artificial egg” — a “foundational step,” it said, “toward resurrecting extinct bird species” such as the New Zealand giant moa and the dodo.

The announcement resembled Colossal’s rollout of the “dire wolf” pups: Publications that had received guided tours of its lab produced breathless articles taking Colossal’s claims at face value, generally lacking skeptical commentary by unaffiliated biologists.

The company’s latest announcement is connected with its larger campaign to “de-extinct” long-disappeared animals and restore them to their ancient habitats.

Its “landmark” project in this respect is “the resurrection of the woolly mammoth … It will walk like a woolly mammoth, look like one, sound like one, but most importantly it will be able to inhabit the same ecosystem previously abandoned by the mammoth’s extinction.” (Colossal specifies that it’s talking about “a cold-resistant elephant with all of the core biological traits of the woolly mammoth.”

Colossal says it’s considering Asian or African elephants as surrogate parents for its mammoths. Thus far, however, this effort has yielded only a few dozen genetically modified long-haired mice, which evokes the Aesopian adage about the mountain that labored and brought forth a mouse.

To unaffiliated scientists, Colossal’s talk of de-extincting long-gone species is hyperbole: hopelessly premature and consistently oversold. The focus of its latest announcement is not so much an egg as an artificial eggshell — though the company defends its labeling the technology as an “artificial egg” as legitimate. The 26 hatched chicks were grown from fertilized tissue transferred from hen’s eggs into the new container, which functioned essentially as an incubator.

To be fair, the company appears to have successfully developed a membrane that can provide oxygen to the growing embryos better than existing technologies that have allowed chicks to grow outside the shell. But outside scientists suggest it’s a stretch to see that as a major step toward resurrecting the moa, a giant flightless bird that disappeared from its New Zealand habitat in the 1400s.

Colossal co-founder and CEO Ben Lamm acknowledged that a long road will have to be traversed to move from hatching baby chickens to resurrecting the moa by email. He conceded that “gestation is just one step of many steps in the process.”

Lamm portrayed Colossal’s de-extinction efforts as something of a public service. “Bringing back extinct species allows us to design a long-term system model for endangered species production while also developing novel technologies applicable to conservation today … and in some cases undo the sins humanity has committed,” he said.

Many scientists express concerns about the “de-extinction” idea itself. One is that it’s impossible to resurrect a species that has been gone for so long that no biological material that could provide original DNA exists any longer.

Even if it could be done, whether it should be done is doubtful.

“The environment in which they lived has been evolving since their absence,” says evolutionary biologist Vincent J. Lynch of the University at Buffalo. “To put them back into that environment is introducing an invasive species into an environment in which it hasn’t lived before.” That could produce difficulties for the cloned animals and for modern life, including the possible revival of prehistoric pathogens for which humankind has no defense.

“The de-extinction breathlessness,” says biologist Paul Knoepfler of UC Davis, “potentially endangers real animals for the sake of hypothetical future de-extincted ones.” Colossal boasts about conservation programs it has helped to fund; those “could do some good,” Knoepfler says, “but it would be far better if more of the capital they raised just went directly to helping protect living but endangered animals rather than trying to bring back extinct ones.”

(Knoepfler gave Colossal his annual science hype award last year for its dire wolf claim. “I’m not convinced that a single animal that they ever ‘de-extinct’ will be the real deal,” he told me.)

Colossal’s de-extinction palaver has been exploited by conservatives to justify attacks on the federal Endangered Species Act and other conservation initiatives. That was the subtext of a tweet Interior Secretary Doug Burgum posted after the dire wolf announcement, proclaiming that “the revival of the Dire Wolf” would allow the Trump administration to “fundamentally change how we think about species conservation.”

None of this is to dispute that the company has been successful in seizing the attention of people with capital to spare. Privately held Colossal raised $200 million early last year on terms that gave it a putative valuation of $10.2 billion. Its “cultural advisory board” boasts influencers such as Martin, Tom Brady and filmmaker Peter Jackson.

The company defends its PR-heavy campaigning as a necessity in the modern world. “We’re competing with the Kardashians,” co-founder Ben Lamm told Rolling Stone. “We are in the attention economy. … If we want people to care about things like genome engineering and CRISPR and conservation, it has to be as thoughtful, as interesting, as what they’re going to see on MTV or Bravo.”

Lamm told me he was hoping for even more press coverage than the 26 hatchlings received: “I don’t think everyone understood and articulated the incredible challenges overcome in this achievement. I am disappointed more people didn’t cover the news and the significance for developmental biology, science overall and conservation.”

What’s alarming about the credulous coverage that Colossal receives from the press is that it points to a decline in responsible reporting on science. This is what keeps experienced pseudoscience debunkers on their toes.

It’s what has enabled political partisans to sully news columns and the airwaves with unsupported claims that the COVID-19 pandemic originated in a Chinese lab and that anti-pandemic measures — including the COVID vaccines — were worse than letting the infection spread.

In recent weeks, the press has been filled with what the veteran debunker David Gorski labeled a “credulous take” on acupuncture, ostensibly explaining how acupuncture works — never mind that there is no solid evidence that acupuncture does work.

Once misinformation or disinformation takes root in the public sphere, it’s almost impossible to eradicate. A couple of examples related to Colossal should suffice. One comes from Rolling Stone, which headlined its article about the chicken hatchlings thusly: “First They Brought Back Dire Wolves. Next Up? Artificial Wombs.”

The problem here is that Colossal did not “bring back dire wolves.” The company’s chief scientist, Beth Shapiro, acknowledged as much a few weeks after its initial announcement, telling New Scientist, “It’s not possible to bring something back that is identical to a species that used to be alive. Our animals are grey wolves with 20 edits that are cloned.”

The Rolling Stone article, which posted Tuesday, was based in part on a tour of its Dallas lab the company granted a reporter in February.

“To enter Colossal’s 55,000-square-foot Dallas headquarters is to find one’s senses fairly assaulted by the Power of Tech,” the publication wrote, describing it as a place where “many wondrous things are happening.”

Discover Magazine’s article about the hatchlings was similarly uncritical, starting with the headline: “Colossal Hatches Healthy Chicks From an Artificial Egg, Setting the Stage for Giant Moa De-Extinction.”

Not everybody has swallowed the Kool-Aid. Standout reporting on Colossal has been done by Michael Le Page of the British journal New Scientist, whose most recent article bristled with skeptical takes about the hatchling announcement from established scientists.

Colossal’s approach to communicating its work with what I termed last year “unsparing razzmatazz” is playing with fire. That’s because the public that has bought into its inflated spiel may end up being let down with a jolt.

“Eventually it’s going to come out that they didn’t de-extinct the dire wolf or the moa,” Lynch says. “When people realize that, it’s going to negatively impact their understanding of science and their belief in scientific claims, at a time when people are already skeptical about what we do.”