A few months ago, it was reported that Jeremy Allen White was part of the cast for The Mandalorian and Grogu, playing none other than Rotta the Hutt. It seems that has now been all but confirmed.
At the Star Wars Celebration panel for the upcoming film, a trailer was screened exclusively for those in attendance, and at the end of the trailer there was a shot of a very buff Hutt pumping his arms to stoke the crowd in an arena, with Grogu snacking on popcorn in the stands beside Din Djarin.
To be fair, it wasn’t officially said to be Rotta, but the fact that previous reports mentioned Rotta would be included, and that Rotta would be a very buff gladiator Hutt, makes it easy to draw these connections. Rotta the Hutt will be in The Mandalorian and Grogu, and he appears to be a gladiator competing in fights.
Rotta is the son of the infamous Jabba the Hutt, and he actually appeared as a baby in The Clone Wars movie. That movie was set during the early days of the war, and it saw Ahsoka Tano and Anakin Skywalker have to retrieve Rotta after the kid was kidnapped by the Separatists in an attempt to frame the Republic and stir division between the Hutts and the Republic. That plan backfired, of course, and we haven’t heard what Rotta was up to after those events. While Jabba is dead by the time of The Mandalorian, his son is apparently still well-off.
It’s still a pretty crazy idea for this movie to pull in Rotta the Hutt in this kind of role, but it’s exactly the kind of crazy that The Mandalorian has often resorted to, with a lot of success. There wasn’t much information revealed at the panel about the movie, so we’ll have to wait to learn more. For now, it appears that the reports were true, and that we’ll be seeing Rotta when The Mandalorian and Grogu hits theaters on May 22, 2026.
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