How long is each episode of ‘The Mandalorian’ season 3?

Even though The Mandalorian has only just returned to our screens, countless Star Wars fans are already desperate to know how much content they’ll be getting in season three of the hit show. Disney and the various production companies involved in making the series have been tight-lipped about countless aspects of the newest season to further build the hype, with episode summaries and episode names impossible to find until the release date, even for the most talented Star Wars sleuths.

If you’re a fan of Pedro Pascal’s galactic adventures and want to know how much Mandalorian content you’ll have the chance to take in over the coming weeks, we’re here to try and help. For now, though, we can only work with what we’re given, but we can also make some educated guesses about what’s to come.

How long is each episode of The Mandalorian season three?

So far, we know exactly how long the first two episodes are. When coming up with a total run time for these episodes, you have to take into account that the first 80 to 90 seconds of each episode consists of a recap and opening sequence, and that they also end with around 4 minutes and thirty seconds of credit scenes. In previous seasons, that’s been as high as two minutes and 30 seconds for an opening sequence, and nearly six minutes of credits.

Episode one of season three of The Mandalorian, or “Chapter 17: The Apostate,” is 36 minutes and 58 seconds long, with an 80-second-long recap and opening sequence, and four minutes and 31 seconds of credits. This means there’s 31 minutes and seven seconds of content.

Episode two of season three of The Mandalorian, or “Chapter 18: The Mines of Mandalore,” is 44 minutes and two seconds long, with an 85 second recap and opening sequence, and exactly four and a half minutes of credits. This means there’s 38 minutes and seven seconds of content to watch.

How long will the upcoming episodes of The Mandalorian season three be?

As you can see from how different the first two episode lengths are, and from the other two seasons, trying to figure out the rest of the episode timings of The Mandalorian season three will take a bit of guesswork. While 30 minutes of content seems to be the minimum, the other two seasons of The Mandalorian have both have episodes that stretch past the 50 minute mark. The longest episode in the series so far is the season two opener “Chapter 9: The Marshall,” which clocks in at 52 minutes and 44 seconds, with an opening sequence that lasts two minutes and 20 seconds, and a credits scene that’s five minutes and 46 seconds long, giving us 45 minutes and 38 seconds of actual content.

IMDB currently lists the lengths of all unaired episodes as a standard 40 minutes under their “Technical Specs” section. As the series is released, this will be updated. The only thing we can be certain of is that each episode will have its own unique length.

Why do the episode lengths of The Mandalorian vary so much?

Thanks to years of television slots being consistent, you could be fairly certain that each episode of the shows you watched wouldn’t vary much in terms of length. Most sitcoms would fall within a minute of the 22 minute range, whereas hour-long network shows would clock in at somewhere near 45 minutes of content. The main exception to this rule was subscription services like HBO.

However, as we’ve seen above, The Mandalorian has some huge discrepancies between episode lengths. One reason this might be the case is because streaming services, like HBO, don’t have advertising slots, meaning the restrictions that used to exist for shows are no longer relevant. As each episode of the series is considered a chapter, director John Favreau and the writers on The Mandalorian are utilizing this freedom from constraints to tell the story how they want to — which means a large variation in episode run time. The multiple story threads running through the show also contribute to this difference in episode lengths.