No Season Two For ‘The Acolyte’ As Disney Reportedly Cancels Failed Star Wars Series
In perhaps the least surprising development in the franchise’s entire history, Disney has reportedly decided that rather than pursue a second season, they will instead be outright cancelling Leslye Headland’s widely-panned The Acolyte series.
News of the series’ burial was first raised on August 19th courtesy of Deadline‘s Nellie Andreeva, who reportedly learned of the House of Mouse’s decision by way of her own insider sources.
At current, neither Disney proper nor Andreeva’s sources have offered an official reason behind the series being axed roughly a month after it aired its first season finale.
However, it’s not hard to guess that one of, if not the main reasons for the show’s cancellation is the fact that, despite what paid Disney shills and current era Star Wars die-hards would otherwise argue, it performed absolutely abysmally with audiences.
For the best indication of the series’ stumbles, one need look no further than the regular streaming data provided by noted television analytics firm Nielsen.
According to their 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 fallen completely off 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 managing to pull in just 1.9 million viewers for the series’ then-latest episode.
And unfortunately for the series, “off the charts” is where it would remain for almost the entirety of its remaining run, only being 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).
Ultimately, while this news comes as a bit of schadenfreude to the numerous Star Wars fans who have been acting as the canary in the coal mine regarding the franchise’s ongoing quality deterioration, it undoubtedly comes as a disappointing blow to the series’ showrunner, Leslye Headland, particularly in light of her previous public plea to fans that they actively campaign to support the series’ potential future.
Asked during a post-season finale interview with Collider‘s Maggie Lovitt if there was anything fans could do to help sway the minds at Disney to renew The Acolyte, the showrunner 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.”
“Encourage your friends to watch the show,” she continued. “A lot of my work has been word of mouth. 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.”
Suffice to say, it looks like Disney’s last ditch, $180 million gamble to revive interest in the all-but-dead franchise did not pay off.
Ah well. There’s always Skeleton Crew for Disney to hang their hopes on…right?
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