‘The Acolyte’ Confirmed Ratings Disaster, Disney Star Wars Series Disappears From Nielsen Charts After Just Three Weeks
Now that’s just downright brutal – According to the latest ratings, it only took three weeks and four episodes for The Acolyte to completely fall out of favor with viewers.
The Star Wars series’ unfortunate (but unsurprising given its consistently poor storytelling) ratings fall off was confirmed by television analytics firm Nielsen via their reported ‘Top 10 TV Streaming Originals’ rankings chart for the week of June 17th – June 23rd.
As seen therein, while such other streaming originals as Bridgerton, The Boys, and Mayor of Kingstown managed to place, The Acolyte was completely absent from the podium.
Per the numbers reported for the week’s 10th most popular series, Netflix’s King of Collectibles: The Goldin Touch (which charted due to the June 12th release of its second season), this means The Acolyte managed to pull in less than 298 million collective watch minutes across its four episodes.
But that number alone doesn’t paint a full picture of The Acolyte‘s stumble.
Using King of Collectibles‘ 298 million watch minutes as an admittedly generous point of reference for The Acolyte‘s unreported ratings, the numbers reveal that each of the then-available episodes of the Leslye Headland-helmed series pulled in an average of only 74.5 million viewing minutes each.
Divide this number by the series’ average episode run time of 38 minutes (151 minutes total across four episodes), and the resulting figure reveals that, at best – and keep in mind, this is a very, very, very rough estimation – only around 1.9 million viewers tuned in to watch and/or catch-up with the fourth part of Mae and Osha’s extended childhood spat.
(For comparison, the worst performing episode of the most recent and widely-panned Doctor Who season, ‘Dot and Bubble‘ still caught the interest of at least 3.38 million viewers in the week of its premiere – and that was just for a single episode!)
To further drive home just how abysmal this result is, in the week of its debut, The Acolyte beat out Netflix’s Hitler and the Nazis: Evil documentary, Netflix’s reality dating show Perfect Match, and the aforementioned drama Mayor of Kingtown to take seventh place on Nielsen’s weekly streaming originals chart, posting a total of 488 million watch minutes across its two-episode premiere.
The next week, the latest live-action Star Wars disaster was able to climb one spot higher, its 370 million watch minutes for the period allowing it to overtake Netflix’s Eric, Hitler and the Nazis: Evil, Mayor of Kingstown, and the animated sci-fi sitcom Futurama for 6th place.
And the rest, as readers know from the above update, is history.
And though Collider has taken to claiming that the series “continues to dominate streaming charts”, it should be explicitly noted that their cited data comes not from Nielsen, but Reelgood, a streaming service aggregator app whose numbers also take into account “engagement”, a vague measurement defined by the platform themselves as “an aggregation of user interactions with titles across Reelgood platforms, including playbacks, tracking, and other interactions.”
In other words, due to counting seemingly any interaction a user has with the series on any of their platforms as a point towards The Acolyte‘s popularity – such as searching for it, clicking news articles related to it, or even negatively commenting on it – Reelgood’s data cannot be relied on as an accurate measure of the show’s viewership numbers.
Unsurprisingly in the face of such overwhelming data, the series’ unpopularity has not gone unnoticed by its cast and crew.
Pressed during an interview with GQ‘s Yang-Yi Goh for his thoughts on The Acolyte‘s negative reception, Qimir actor Manny Jacinto opined, “It’s a cycle.”
“With everything that’s come out since the original trilogy, there’s always a very passionate group that doesn’t like change, that wants that same feeling that they experienced when they were kids, only now they’ve grown up and their taste has matured and they’re more critical about art or the world, and then they are just more precious about the things that they experienced when they were younger,” said Jacinto.
Noting how fans have warmed up to the prequel trilogy in the years since its release, he then declared, “Looking at it through that lens is really helpful.”
“And it sucks that sometimes you have to wait 10, 20, 30 years to get your flowers,” he concluded. “But the fact that a lot of people are enjoying it right now, I think that’s all I can focus on right now. It might just take some time to get other people on board, but at the end of the day, I am so proud of what we made.”
Meanwhile, Headland herself has admitted that, at this point, the series’ renewal depends on a particularly strong outpouring of post-season finale fan support.
Asked during an interview Collider‘s Maggie Lovitt as to what it would take to ensure another outing for Mae and Qimir, Headland asserted, “Truly, any online support and love you can send the show.”
“It’s a little tricky because of the way that the internet works, but if you enjoyed the show and you want to see more of the story, any support that you can give the show on social media platforms would be super helpful,” said Headland. “Sending love to the cast, too. You’ve seen what Hayden [Christensen] went through. He’s getting the love now, but give the love now if you enjoyed the performances. Even if you were kind of like whatever on the show, if you enjoyed the performances, get on their social media, let them know that you love them, or that you support them or that the performances were great.”
To this end, Headland then called on The Acolyte‘s fanbase to, “Encourage your friends to watch the show.”
“A lot of my work has been word of mouth,” she told Lovitt. ” said the showrunner. “We were talking about the review bombing, so just telling people don’t pay attention to the IMDb score. If you enjoyed it, tell people. It kind of seems that it’s sort of basic, but I think what’s interesting is that, nowadays, if you like a show, you’re very rarely going to go online and be like, ‘I liked this show!'”
“You watch it, you move on, maybe you mention it to somebody over dinner and be like, ‘Oh, I just binged this show. It was fun. Lee Jung-jae is an awesome actor,'” she further explained. “It usually comes up that way, as opposed to going online and saying, “I love this show.’ So, if you did love the show, then pivot and be appreciative.”
“By the way, I know this is already happening, even though I’m not online,” she concluded. “People have been sending me fun tweets and beautiful artwork, and all of the ship comments, and I’m absolutely loving it. I know it’s out there. But if you aren’t doing it, I would encourage you to do it and support the show. So, thank you.”
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