GTA 6 and Star Wars Will Be the Ultimate Barbenheimer of Games vs. Movies, But the Winner Is Already Clear

When The Mandalorian and Grogu is released next year on May 22, 2026 – the first new Star Wars movie to hit theaters in six and a half years – and then Grand Theft Auto VI hits four days later on May 26, 2026 – the first new GTA game in 12 and a half years – which one do you think is going to be the bigger deal? And which is going to be same old/same old?

On paper at least, these should be two of the biggest pop culture events of the year – the Barbenheimer of 2026. A new Star Wars movie? A new GTA title!? Grand Theft Watto!!? And while we can guarantee that GTA 6 will be huge – it’s already huge – The Mandalorian and his little friend are actually far less of a sure thing.

It reminds me of when I was a kid and I told my Noni that I would eat pizza every day if I could. And I meant it! She was like, no, you’d get sick of it eventually. But man, pizza every day sounds amazing! You know what though? Noni was 100% right. Pizza every day is actually really freaking gross, and it’s bad for you, and it’s bad for the people selling the pizza in the long run because eventually I’m just going to not want to even think about pizza again for a long, long time.

And this is where we’re at with Star Wars right now: It’s pizza every day, over and over again. But GTA… the anticipation for a new GTA game has been building for years. And in some ways, that very anticipation is a big part of the allure of the franchise as well. It’s something Lucasfilm and Disney would do well to take note of.

It’s not that GTA has a bigger cultural footprint than Star Wars. On the contrary, everyone knows who Darth Vader is (even my Noni did, I expect; at the very least she got me a TIE Fighter toy for my third-grade graduation). But the GTAs of the world are still aimed at a tighter demographic. The reason something like GTA can make as much money as it does (more on that in a sec) is because folks spend a lot more playing a game like that than they do going to see a movie. Its success is not because more people are playing it than are watching Star Wars. But one must also consider the lasting impact of a game of this nature, the amount of time that it takes to complete, the replayability, and the interactivity versus the, frankly, old-fashioned act of watching a movie or show and then moving on.

2015’s The Force Awakens, which kicked off the era of modern (i.e., Disney) Star Wars, brought in $2.071 billion at the box office worldwide. But Lucasfilm’s hyperdrive motivator was already starting to lose some steam by the time the Sequel Trilogy closed out: The last new Star Wars movie to be released, 2019’s The Rise of Skywalker, made $1.077 billion, almost half what The Force Awakens did. Star Wars was already feeling pretty commonplace after just four short years of its return to the big screen, and the numbers bear that out.