Building a Star Wars Timeline Because We Could
A movie-night question turned into a small visual guide: when does The Mandalorian and Grogu happen, and who else is still around?
On Saturday, May 23, 2026, Connie and I went to see The Mandalorian and Grogu. The movie had just opened, and on the ride home we fell into the exact kind of question Star Wars quietly invites: where does this fit?
Not just where it sits in release order, but where it lands inside the galaxy's own history. How long after Endor is this? How far before Rey? Is Luke alive? Leia? Ahsoka? Is Grogu actually older than nearly everybody in the room?
Connie had the right idea: make a timeline. GPT took care of the first pass, and then we kept shaping it until it became a real little site instead of a one-off answer.
Where the new movie fits
The official StarWars.com page describes the movie as a New Republic story starring Din Djarin and Grogu after their Disney+ adventures. For the chart, I placed it around 11 ABY: after Return of the Jedi, after the main run of The Mandalorian, and long before the sequel trilogy.
Open the full interactive Star Wars timeline for the bigger version with filters, plot markers, and character lifespans.
Who would still be alive?
That was the more fun question. If we are roughly in the early New Republic period, a surprising number of familiar people are still on the board.
Rey is not born yet. Finn is either not born yet or right at the edge, depending how tightly you pin the movie year. Vader and Yoda are gone. Palpatine is the messy one, because Star Wars has never met a clean timeline it could not haunt from Exegol.
How we built it
The full timeline started as a simple agent-assisted data exercise: gather the canon films and major series, place them on the BBY/ABY calendar, then add major character lifespans so the era felt inhabited instead of abstract.
From there it became a design problem. A spreadsheet-style answer was useful, but not beautiful. The chart needed filters, event markers, character rows, and enough visual hierarchy that someone could answer one question quickly without becoming trapped in every footnote of Star Wars chronology.
The first version went wide and dense, which is exactly what a proper timeline wants to do. This post includes the cleaner version: the five-beat story around the movie. The full site stays available for deeper wandering.
Why this belongs here
This builds on the same theme as recent posts: using agents to create fun, specific, beautiful things because we can. Not because there is a market for a personal Star Wars chronology page. Not because every curiosity needs to become a product. Because a question appeared, the tools were available, and making the answer visible was more satisfying than merely looking it up.
That is the part I keep enjoying about this new personal-software loop. It gives small curiosities a place to become real. Sometimes that means a backyard weather app. Sometimes it means a 3D galaxy map. Sometimes it means a Star Wars timeline born from a movie date and Connie saying, reasonably, "we should make a timeline."
Source context: StarWars.com lists The Mandalorian and Grogu as a May 22, 2026 release and frames it as a New Republic story with Din Djarin and Grogu.