Disney Tax Documents Reveal Total Production Costs For ‘The Acolyte’ Actually Amounted To Roughly $230 Million
As fans may remember, one of the most regularly-touted memes surrounding The Acolyte was the fact that the eight episode, extremely boring Star Wars series reportedly cost a whopping $180 million to produce – roughly 22.5 million per episode.
After hearing this number, many a viewer and critic had a good hearty laugh – ‘That much? For ‘The power of many, the power of one’?’
Now, imagine how much deeper those laughs would have been had the public known that the series’ true production budget actually was actually closer to $230 million.
This revelation was brought to light by That Park Place reporter Jonas J. Campbell, who was among the first individuals to take notice of a recent financial report filed with the UK government by The Acolyte‘s locally-established production company, Blue Stockings Limited.
[Disclaimer: This article’s author shares a working relationship and personal friendship with Campbell].
Therein, the company reported that they spent roughly £38 million GBP in 2022 and £134 million in 2023, a total of £172 million to produce the Amandla Stenberg-led outing.
Taking into account the exchange rates as of this article’s writing, when converted to USD, this figure reveals that The Acolyte‘s cost in American dollars was not $180 million, but closer to $230 million – or approximately $28.75 million per episode.
(And even taking into account the historical exchange rates seen in September 2023, Blue Stockings’ spending still amounted to $218 million – slightly better (maybe the catering team chose to go to Nandos on a couple of afternoons instead of defaulting to fresh better) but still not all together great.)
And yet, for all this big budget spending, as viewers now know, it was practically all for naught given that the show posted absolutely terrible ratings.
According to Nielsen’s Streaming Originals Top 10 charts, while The Acolyte respectively ranked 7th and 6th in its first two weeks on air, by the time the series aired its fourth episode, it had disappeared from the charts.
Taking into account numbers reported for the week’s 10th most popular series, Netflix’s King of Collectibles: The Golden Touch (which charted due to the June 12th release of its second season), by the time of its fourth episode, The Acolyte was collectively pulling in less than 298 million collective watch minutes.
Dissecting the numbers even further, an analysis of these watch minutes reveals 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 show that, at best – and keep in mind, this is a very, very, very rough estimation – The Acolyte was struggling to pull in just 1.9 million viewers for the series’ then-latest episode.
Notably, the largely-rejected series was only saved from complete irrelevance by The Acolyte’s season – and now ultimately series – finale, which managed to place 10th in its premiere week with 335 million total watch minutes (notably the lowest of any Disney-era Star Wars television series finale).
Suffice to say, not only was The Acolyte a financial disaster (as we already knew), but it earned that title by burning through almost a quarter of a billion dollars.
All that for some of the most lackluster lightsaber action of the entire franchise.
NEXT: No Season Two For ‘The Acolyte’ As Disney Reportedly Cancels Failed Star Wars Series
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