Confirmed: The Mandalorian to release weekly on Disney+ UK
David Farnor | On 19, Mar 2020
It’s official: The Mandalorian will be released weekly on Disney+ when it launches in the UK next week, but with some good news for subscribers.
The House of Mouse’s streaming home for Disney, Pixar, Marvel, Star Wars, National Geographic and more will host over 500 films and more than 300 series when it arrives on British screens on 24th March. At launch, Disney+ will premiere 26 original series and movies exclusively on the service – you can see the full rundown, plus trailers here.
In most cases, Disney+ original series will have Episode 1 available at launch, with new episodes released weekly at 8am on Fridays, not unlike Apple TV+’s release strategy. However, Star Wars fans frustrated to wait for The Mandalorian have some consolation in the fact that Episodes 1 and 2 will both be available at launch on 24th March, with Episode 3 arriving on 27th March, before then reverting to weekly Friday releases.
Star Wars: The Clone Wars’ finale season will also drop two episodes at launch, with two episodes then releasing every Friday, starting 27th March. That will catch the UK up with the rest of the world, and, from 17th April, episodes will then be released weekly on Fridays.
“This rough and ready sci-fi Western is the best thing to happen to Star Wars since Luke found out who his father was,” we wrote in our spoiler-free review. You can read that here.
Disney+ costs £5.99 a month or £59.99 a year. Our full guide to the content available on Disney+ UK – including The Simpsons – is here. Hit the button below to sign up.
The Mandalorian set for weekly release on Disney+ UK?
18th February 2020
The Mandalorian looks set for a weekly release on Disney+ in the UK.
The live-action Star Wars series is the flagship title for Disney’s new subscription streaming platform, Disney+, which launched in the US last November. Set after the fall of the Empire in Episode VI, long after the stories of Jango and Boba Fett, it follows the travails of a lone gunfighter in the outer reaches of the galaxy far from the authority of the New Republic.
Pedro Pascal (Game of Thrones) plays the eponymous bounty hunter on a mission to collect a particularly difficult prize. The cast also includes Werner Herzog, Nick Nolte and Gina Carano, as well as Carl Weathers and Giancarlo Esposito.
The series has been one of the most talked-about titles on Disney+ since its US debut, with episodes dropping weekly for subscribers Stateside, until its finale in December – at which point a second season was confirmed.
In the UK, Disney+ will launch on 24th March, finally giving Star Wars fans on British soil the chance to catch up with the show. Now, however, it appears that fans will have to wait some time binge the whole box set, with Disney+ seeming to be lining up a similar weekly tactic.
“#TheMandalorian episodes will start to roll out from March 24th,” Disney+ announced on Twitter.
The approach is similar to Apple TV+’s distribution strategy, as the new streaming platform tries to avoid a high churn rate of subscribers: with a small volume of original content available during the service’s early days, releasing them all-at-once would give subscribers little incentive to stick around once reaching the end of The Mandalorian’s eighth episode.
Indeed, the problem could be exacerbated by the potential absence of The Simpsons on Disney+ UK, with the Fox animated series notably absent from the launch trailer unveiled by the House of Mouse last night – despite being present in the same trailer used to promote the US launch.
Hello! It’s lovely to meet you all. It’s a good thing we’re good at queuing patiently in the UK! It’s now only a few weeks until #DisneyPlus launches *cue the confetti, tears of joy and fireworks* Follow @DisneyPlusUK for the latest #DisneyPlus updates. pic.twitter.com/B4Ni3sw85H
— Disney+ UK (@DisneyPlusUK) February 17, 2020
“We plan to premiere lots of content at the same time as our friends in the US. However, there will be some variation in content between countries,” Disney+ added on its social media account.
It also confirmed that Disney Life customers will be automatically converted to Disney+ accounts when the new platform launches.
For more on The Mandalorian Season 2, click here, or to see the trailer for Season 1, head this way.