Like most everyone else, The Acolyte star Manny Jacinto is well aware that Disney’s latest Star Wars series has been an absolute miss with audiences.
Suffice to say, The Acolyte has been one of the biggest viewership disasters in the franchise’s entire history.
As previously reported, per data provided by noted television analytics firm Nieslen, The Acolyte posted roughly 488 million collective / 244 million average viewing minutes across its two-episode debut – the second-worst premiere numbers of any Star Wars television series behind Andor.
(However, it should be noted that these results are not so clear cut. While Andor objectively pulled in less viewing minutes than The Acolyte, the former debuted on a Wednesday and the latter on a Tuesday. In other words, The Acolyte‘s benefited from an entire extra day of accessibility than it’s counterpart.)
And unfortunately for Disney, things only went downhill from there.
According to Nielsen, the following week saw The Acolyte draw in just 370 million collective / 123.3 million average viewing minutes across its then-available three episodes – a drop of almost half compared to its two-part premiere.
With the series’ struggles so prominent and unable to be ignored, it should come as no surprise that the topic came up during a recent, pre-finale interview given by the aforementioned Jacinto to GQ.
Pressed by site writer Yang-Yi Goh for his thoughts on The Acolyte‘s negative reception, the Qimir actor 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.
Pointing to the ongoing softening of fans’ feelings towards the prequel trilogy, 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.”
Should one – for some reason – wish to step up as of these ‘late boarders’, the entirety of The Acolyte‘s eight-episode first season is now available for streaming on Disney Plus.
