The power of one. The power of two. The power of many. But perhaps not quite the power one would need to turn back the inevitable. Disney cancelled The Acolyte last month after abysmal ratings and lukewarm reviews, as viewership fell with every episode of the first lackluster season. Now, fans have joined forces to sign a petition and plead with the House of Mouse to give the series a second chance.
The show was certainly divisive, but it appears the vast majority of Star Wars fans simply don’t care enough about its fate to sign a petition to save it. The Acolyte’s most vociferous fans continue to champion a renewal on social media, reddit and other corners of the internet, but it’s increasingly obvious that this is little more than a vocal minority.
We’ll look at several petitions side-by-side to illustrate my point, starting with The Acolyte. This petition has garnered just over 72,000 signatures as of this writing. That’s quite a few signatures compared to many TV-related Change.org petitions. Of course, Star Wars has a massive fanbase, so you’d expect big numbers.
However, several other petitions lead me to believe that support for The Acolyte within the Star Wars community is actually pretty tepid. For instance, this petition to restore deleted scenes in Bridgerton’s third season has over 75,000 signatures. Bridgerton is certainly a popular Netflix series, but it is nowhere near as beloved as Star Wars. And this is just to restore some deleted scenes!
Another a-historical romance series that was recently cancelled is My Lady Jane on Amazon Prime Video. Unlike The Acolyte, I really liked this show (what can I say, I have eclectic taste) and wrote about how wrong Amazon was to cancel it when I heard the news. At the time I linked to a Change.org petition that has now received 12,615 signatures. But there is actually a second My Lady Jane petition calling for a new season that has received over 66,000 signatures. Even assuming 12,000 of those are duplicates, this is still just a few thousand fewer signatures short of The Acolyte’s petition.
For a show that almost nobody has heard of before, based on a relatively little-known book, this is impressive. This many signatures for My Lady Jane, proves just how passionate its fanbase is, and how badly Amazon missed the mark. When I see practically the same number for an IP as massive as Star Wars, it’s obvious that the reverse is true—that only a small slice of the fanbase turned out and Disney was right to cancel the $180 million series. The vocal online support for this show on social media and among the media neither reflects the overall fandom’s antipathy toward The Acolyte, or the show’s quality—or lack thereof.
Now, Disney and Lucasfilm must ask tough questions about the future—and the nature—of Star Wars. Who is the target audience and core demographic, and do these two align? Who buys merchandise and movie tickets? Who brings their spouses and children with them to the movies? Who spreads hype through word of mouth?
Also: What is the fundamental nature of Star Wars? What themes and values do these stories hope to convey? What makes these stories tick and why have people connected with them on such a deep and passionate level? And how should the answers to these questions guide the future of the franchise hopefully into something coherent and compelling?
This is something I’ve discussed in my “theory of the half-interested girlfriend” which posits that if you appeal to your core demographic, the enthusiastic core fanbase will bring more casual audiences into the fold. But, if you don’t appeal to the core demographic, you’ll not only lose your most passionate fans, but all the casual fans they would have brought with them. The same would apply if the romance industry began targeting men instead of their core demographic—women! If women stopped going to chick-flicks, they wouldn’t bring their “half-interested boyfriends” along with them either.
In order to not alienate its core audience, Lucasfilm and Disney need to answer these questions and right the sinking ship. Far too many adaptations or continuations of beloved books, games or franchises, from Star Wars to Lord of the Rings and beyond, have forgotten what they truly are—instead, veering off on a bafflingly futile quest to be something for everyone. There is a difference between broad appeal and stretching that appeal so thin that you become, for lack of a better phrase, like butter scraped over too much bread.
I discuss all this and more in the below video:
P.S. A reader pointed out that the Game Of Thrones petition to remake Season 8 “with competent writers” amassed over 1.8 million signatures. Nothing came of it. Another petition urging Disney to bring the Old Republic era of Star Wars to the small screen racked up 231,000 signatures. Ultimately, these petitions do very little to influence decisions at big companies, but they do reflect fan sentiment and fan sentiment over The Acolyte just doesn’t appear to be very strong.
Update
I thought I’d dig a bit deeper into what themes and values Star Wars ought to convey. It’s pretty simple: These are stories of good vs evil, similar to Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings (another story currently being badly mangled by people who do not have answers to the questions I’m posing).
This type of story is meant to instill within us a sense of right and wrong, of the importance of friendship and camaraderie, and inspire us with tales of heroism and self-sacrifice. Star Wars also serves as a cautionary tale about the corrupting influence of power. (Again, just like Lord of the Rings). Weave those themes into a fun adventure with characters we can relate to and root for and laugh alongside, and you have yourself a winning formula. Try to constantly subvert expectations or somehow create a brand new audience out of the ether and you set yourself up for failure.
I mentioned earlier that I’m a fan of My Lady Jane. This is a very well-made, well-written series aimed, like most romance TV shows, books and movies, squarely at women. I’ve discussed previously that I don’t think studios should attempt to reorient the target demographic of the romance genre to appeal to men instead of women. That sounds crazy, but it’s effectively the experiment being applied to Star Wars and similar sci-fi/fantasy in reverse. The reason the romance genre is so successful is simple: the people in charge understand the questions I posed above. Who is the target demographic for romances? Who lines up at book signings? Women! If you don’t appeal to women, men won’t show up for these.
We go to “chick flicks” because we know our dates enjoy them and we want our dates to be happy (and because many of us are sappy romantics at heart, even if we don’t like to admit it). If your romance show or movie doesn’t appeal to women, women won’t go see it and the “half-interested boyfriend” won’t either.
What makes romance stories tick? Well, there’s a whole bunch of factors but one thing you don’t see is a concerted effort to undermine their success. Instead, we’ve seen the romance genre grow naturally and organically to include the wildly popular romantic-fantasy hits like The Fourth Wing or A Court Of Thorns And Roses. Adaptations of these should appeal, first and foremost, to women. Oddly enough, that doesn’t actually exclude men. Just because there’s a target demographic doesn’t mean a movie or book or TV show locks everyone else out. Also, the fact that a new branch of fantasy has emerged with an organic female audience tells me that this is how you create content in the fantasy space for women, rather than attempting to change the target demographic of Star Wars or Marvel and so forth. It reminds me a bit of Jenna Ortega’s recent comments about wanting original female characters rather than “female James Bond.”
“I love that there’s a lot more female leads nowadays, I think that’s so special. But we should have our own,” Ortega said in an MTV interview recently. “I don’t like it when it’s like a spinoff — I don’t want to see like ‘Jamie Bond.’ You know? I want to see another badass.”
Know your target audience. Hire talented writers and experienced showrunners to craft your series. There is still room within this formula—if you’ve asked the right bleeping questions—to have strong female characters, diverse casts and even some fun subversive elements in Star Wars, which has had all these things since the beginning.
Just look at Andor if you don’t believe me. Here is a series that defies all expectations but still contains the heart of Star Wars and its heroism and fight of good vs evil. Andor has a diverse cast, strong female characters and doesn’t rely on constant callbacks, references and Easter Eggs to work, eschewing almost all such fan-service in favor of a compelling story written and produced by people of talent. You won’t see a lightsaber in Andor, or hear the words ‘May the Force be with you’ yet it still feels more grounded in the Star Wars universe than just about anything since the Original Trilogy. In other words, the antithesis of The Acolyte.
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