The Acolyte has been cancelled and will not get a season 2. That has been hard enough for fans of the show to hear, but now there is panic spreading that Disney may take things a step further and delete the entire series from the service, trying to take some sort of tax write-off in the process, as we’ve seen in the past across the streaming industry.
Well, there’s good news and bad news. But first, why are people worried at all?
This appears to have started with fans saying that Disney has deleted all official Acolyte merchandise from its store, as it’s not a sub-category, and it returns no search results.
Looking into this further, I’m not clear is this a smoking gun. You cannot find Andor merchandise either, for instance, and Acolyte products are still being sold elsewhere like toys. There are, however, old links to specific items that don’t just have a sold-out page, the listings are gone completely and return error pages, which is odd. Still, I’m not even sure “deleting merch” equals “deleting show.” But back to that.
No, Disney cannot delete The Acolyte for a tax write-off. While you may recall Warner Bros. doing that with Batgirl and Coyote vs. ACME, that happened before those shows were released. So Disney cannot do that with The Acolyte, a fully released series.
However.
Disney can delete the show to avoid paying residuals for the series, and there is already precedent for this within Disney Plus itself. This exact same thing happened to Willow, a show that was little-watched and Disney simply nuked it. There is now no legal way to watch the Willow show, which infuriated its creators who knew why they’d done it:
“They gave us six months,” writer John Bickerstaff said. “Not even. This business has become absolutely cruel….Before you say tax-write off: these shows have already been released and so can’t be a write-off. And in the case of Willow, they own the property outright. The only conclusion is that this is to get out of paying residuals. During a strike.”
What’s happened here is that due to past negotiations of streamers underpaying residuals for their content compared to the cable era, is that more places are tempted to just erase low-performing shows instead of continue to pay residuals they don’t deem worth it. And yes, The Acolyte was a poorly watched show, and it’s not out of the realm of possibility this could happen. Here’s how the LA Times explained this when it happened to Willow:
“In other words, Disney had to pay the residuals cost of “Willow” based on how many subscribers the platform had, regardless of how many people were watching the show. Higher residual rates in the new deal that the Writers Guild of America just negotiated will probably accelerate streamers’ decisions to drop shows.”
This would, however, also be an utter PR disaster for Disney. Fans are already complaining that Disney gave into the “toxic” part of the fanbase who hated The Acolyte and wanted it gone, but even if the cancellation decision was more about cost/viewership alone, deleting it from the service is another level entirely and raises questions about Disney’s entire Star Wars wing of content. And of course, that same crowd would celebrate the show being actively incinerated, as they also believe it would wipe it from Star Wars canon. Would it? I don’t even know the answer to that as the entire concept is just so insane. It’s like burning every copy of a Star Wars novel and asking if that means its storylines still exist.
I do not believe the merchandise thing is enough evidence to say Disney is deleting The Acolyte. But they have done it before, and it is not unthinkable it could happen again.
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