I greeted the news that Lucasfilm was canceling The Acolyte after just one season with dismay but no real surprise. Fans had been divided on the series nearly since the beginning, for reasons both justified and ridiculous. The show’s third episode, which established that Anakin Skywalker wasn’t actually the first baby conceived via the Force, only widened the schism.
The Acolyte is the latest battleground in an ongoing culture war that has leached into every part of the American experience. Today there is seemingly nothing that cannot be judged and measured through a political lens. The fact that The Acolyte showrunner Leslye Headland was a lesbian with her own ideas about what Star Wars could be was seen by some as a blatant attempt to “gay up” Star Wars, even though Headland blatantly denied the claim. And, apart from a coven of Force witches who just exist, she’s right.
I suspect these people had already made up their minds long before the series aired, viewing it as a vehicle of unwelcome leftish messaging simply due to Headland’s association. And because they have no sense of humor, they took a joke Headland made about the sexual orientation of C-3PO and R2-D2 as proof of her agenda.
Brief sidebar: It’s super interesting that everyone rushed to attack her claims that perhaps R2-D2 was a lesbian, but skipped over the implication that C-3PO is gay because duh, of course he is.
I saw someone refuting Headland’s joke by pointing out R2-D2 has a phallic-like appendage used to hack into computer ports, and thus, is clearly male and also hetero. Meanwhile I’m left wondering where this need to sexualize robots came from.
These people are now gleefully celebrating the cancelation because they feel they’ve somehow won. But even if you hated The Acolyte, there are no winners here. Not if you truly care about Star Wars.
I have lots of problems with The Acolyte. Like many Disney+ shows, it’s frustratingly mediocre. The writing is lackluster. The much-vaunted mystery, built up across multiple episodes that jump around in the timeline, mostly serve to waste screen time. Character motivations are all over the place. The experience of watching The Acolyte is one of waiting for something to happen, and no longer caring once they finally do.
However, I’m genuinely disappointed there won’t be future seasons. Flawed as it is, The Acolyte managed to be something no other Star Wars has: It was different. Boldly so.
Was that the reason it was canceled? Yes, and no.
The economics of it
Disgruntled viewers review-bombed The Acolyte into oblivion, but it’s super doubtful Lucasfilm or Disney much cared. Such campaigns serve no purpose other than to make people feel like they somehow got even, as though this is all a zero-sum contest they can win. If anything, I think Disney looks as online fans with a distinct whiff of aristocratic disdain. There’s also the old adage about bad news trumping no news.
Complaining about Star Wars is an evergreen part of the experience. So even if the noise did register, Disney probably took it as Star Wars fans being Star Wars fans.
Disney’s sole concern is economic: Is this show stuffing cash in our pockets? And though the economics of streamers is a bit loosey-goosey in that you can’t really tie subscriptions to specific shows, The Acolyte still fails the spirit of the equation.
The Acolyte isn’t actually the most expensive Disney+ Star Wars show. That honor goes to Andor by a pretty wide margin.
However, the story isn’t so cut-and-dried, and not just because Andor is the best thing to come out of Star Wars since The Empire Strikes Back. That $250 million produced 12 episodes of Andor. In contrast, The Acolyte’s $180 million funded 8 episodes.
The Acolyte is the most expensive Disney+ Star Wars series on a per-episode basis.
We can extrapolate further.
Not all episodes are created equal. The average length of an episode of Andor was over 46 minutes, compared with 38 minutes for The Acolyte. The only series with shorter episodes is the first season of The Mandalorian.
(If you’re curious, The Book of Boba Fett has the longest episodes, on average. As someone who struggled through that show, my experience backs up the data.)
The Acolyte is the most costly show to produce on a per-minute basis by a significant margin. All the other shows are more or less in the same ballpark; The Acolyte is in a league of its own, and not in a Tom Hanks kinda way.
These numbers start to take on a Monopoly money sort of unreality, and not just because I can’t fathom 180 million of anything. But it actually boggles my mind that they spent $180 million on The Acolyte. Where did that money go? That’s an honest question. It’s not self-evident from watching the show.
- The cast? Nicely diverse but lacking any big names, apart from Carrie-Anne Moss’ glorified cameo.
- The visuals? The Acolyte lacks the crisp, CGI cinematography of The Mandalorian or the gritty realism of Andor. It looks fine, but not in any way memorable.
- The writing? Don’t make me laugh.
- The fight scenes were dope. Easily the best part of the series. Less so why people were fighting in the first place.
- The costumes looked great, and the Stranger’s helmet was super cool. Not $180 million cool, though.
The Acolyte feels like a show made for less than $100 million, which is a nice way of saying it feels like corners were cut. Except they had all the money they needed.
Disney didn’t get their money’s worth. And that’s not the half of it.
The future of Star Wars on Disney+
Not only was The Acolyte the most expensive Star Wars show, it was also the least-watched one. That’s not a winning combination.
This is not just a problem for The Acolyte. The thing nobody seems to be talking about with all these shows is that less people are watching them.
You could sled down this trend line.
These numbers represent the total number of minutes each episode was viewed the week it premiered, averaged across the entire season. In general, the most-watched episodes are the premieres and finales, with the finale being the high water mark.
The Acolyte’s two-episode premiere garnered a mere 488 million viewer minutes the week it aired. And that’s for two episodes!
Comparing the Nielsen numbers is not exactly an apples-to-apples thing because several shows released multiple episodes during the premiere. One thing blindingly obvious is that the audience just didn’t turn out for The Acolyte. It’s also the only series in which the finale was not the most-viewed single episode. Few people tuned in, and many of those tuned out by the time the finale arrived.
A couple of other points arise when looking at this data.
- We really have no business getting season 2 of Andor. Given the cost to produce season 1 (again, $250 million) and the low viewer numbers, I’m frankly shocked Disney green lit it. I can only assume the positive critical buzz was a deciding factor. Much as it pains me, it doesn’t make economic sense.
- The Book of Boba Fett is a unicorn. It grew substantially over the course of the season. That’s obviously The Mandalorian effect. Still, interesting.
- The Mandalorian has proven the only show to consistently draw eyeballs (see: point 2 above). But even that is down from season 2 highs. I have to wonder if this overall downward trend has anything to do with the decision to continue The Mandalorian as a theatrical release, despite the awkwardness therein.
A new hope, now gone
The weird thing about defending The Acolyte is it’s actually not very good. There are flashes of promise, enough that I was optimistic about season 2. But it’s pretty uniformly meh. But I defend it simply on the grounds that it tried to break away from the Star Wars formula. Finally, after 40-some years of the same old tropes, something different.
The cancelation is my worst fears realized.
The obvious response is a massive course correction to bring Star Wars back to what it’s always been. And maybe always will be, if a certain subset of fans get their way. I’m sure there are executives within Disney who view this as proof positive that Star Wars can only ever be Skywalkers and people they knew. That the long time ago must be confined to a 50-year window, and the galaxy far away restricted to a handful of same-ish planets. That one of the most expansive settings ever imagined must remain small enough to fit within a specific box.
Love or hate The Acolyte, the cancelation is devastating for those of us who want something different for Star Wars, something new, rather than the same stale variations of the original formula.
