The Mandalorian season 2 promotion: A magnificently minimal marketing machine

The marketing for The Mandalorian season 2 has revealed shockingly little — to its advantage.

We’re a day away from the premiere of The Mandalorian season 2, and there’s only been a single trailer. There have been a handful of non-revealing TV spots, and a few rumors about who will appear. So next-to-nothing, and just barely enough to let onlookers know that the show is coming out tomorrow.

And I absolutely love that.

We’ve seen nothing from Ahsoka Tano and Boba Fett and Bo-Katan, even if their inclusion in the season is a virtual certainty.

In order to highlight the fact that Moff Gideon is the antagonist this time around, we’ve gotten… archive footage from the first season. No new trailer shots hinting at his secret plans, no promotional images showing him wielding the Darksaber.

We’ll all in the dark for this one, and I suspect that’s what’ll make the new season so great. Part of the surprise for season 1 was Baby Yoda’s very existence, a bombshell saved for the end of the first episode, instead of the trailers. The actual trailers for season 1 touted the coolness of the titular character while promising a cinematic feel and crowd-rousing action, but nothing from the story.

This time around we’re in a similar predicament: we know that… Mando is going to deliver Baby Yoda (known to the characters as “The Child”) to the Jedi, and that he would like to find other Mandalorians to help guide him with this.

That’s it.

In spite of all the astute trailer analyses (I’ve written one myself, in fact), we really don’t know much about what we’re in for. And that makes the upcoming season all the more tantalizing.

The Mandalorian season 2 is set to begin premiering on Oct. 30 on Disney+.