There has been much gnashing of teeth and rending of garments over the past week over the cancelation of The Acolyte by Disney. The Star Wars series will not live beyond its first season, and it’s unclear whether any of the characters or storylines setup in Season 1 will be carried on anywhere else. I do think that ‘The Stranger’ was a good character and I’d be happy to see him again in some other capacity. Darth Plagueis was spotted toward the end of the season and I’d certainly like to see more of him.
But the show itself was not a hit largely because it was poorly written, riddled with plot-holes, had very uneven acting from its various leads, and looked cheap despite its enormous cost. And while some outlets want to paint the cancelation as a win for “toxic dudebros” in the fandom (as if no women could possibly have disliked The Acolyte) and others are saying that its failure will cause Disney to avoid trying new things, I think the real culprit is two-fold:
- The show as far too expensive and did not draw big enough numbers to justify the cost.
- The was was far too expensive and did not receive enough critical acclaim and widespread fan support.
Both of these factors include a common theme: The Acolyte simply cost far, far too much and that investment wasn’t met with huge viewership numbers like The Mandalorian or critical acclaim like Andor.
Over at reddit, user JarJarJargon has broken down the numbers for each Disney+ Star Wars show:
This is a really interesting table because it shows us lots of important details about each of these series’ success or lack thereof. The Acolyte is the second most expensive show on the list ($180 million) after Andor ($250 million) but that’s only the total spent. If you look at cost-per-minute of footage, The Acolyte cost a whopping $671,641 per minute to produce. Andor cost just $529,661—about $250,000 less per minute—thanks to its longer, meatier episodes and 12-episode count. No other Star Wars show received a 12-episode season and very few episodes across all of Star Wars were as long. As you can see in the chart, Andor runs two-and-a-half hours longer total than Ahsoka and is not much shorter than the first two seasons of Mandalorian combined. And at least with Andor, you can tell where the money went.
The Acolyte cost far more and performed far worse than any other Disney+ Star Wars series and this is why it was canceled. If it had been hugely popular, with viewership numbers closer to The Mandalorian than to Andor, it almost certainly would have been renewed. But the critical reception was lukewarm and fan reception was largely very negative and viewers didn’t show up to watch it. I don’t believe this was due to the show’s diversity or new setting in the High Republic, but rather to the overall sense that this show was poorly executed, with a gimmicky twin storyline that never worked, some truly abysmal moments like the witch chants, and its biggest star killed off in the first five minutes.
I do think The Acolyte had potential and perhaps its second season would have realized that potential, but I remain baffled at Disney placing this much trust and this kind of budget in the hands of someone with very little experience. It reminds me of the trainwreck that is Amazon’s Rings Of Power, also a series with a huge budget and showrunners that have very little experience.
Disney does need to try new things, and Star Wars does need to continue to be diverse—Andor is a great example of a very diverse Star Wars show that worked remarkably well—but the company also needs to be smart and judicious about who it puts in charge of projects. I’ll discuss this more in a future post, but the main problem with Star Wars since Lucasfilm joined Disney is a lack of a clear vision or strategy for the franchise. That’s been obvious since the frustrating sequel trilogy and continues to haunt all things Star Wars to this day.
