‘The Acolyte’ had a bumpy journey through marketing and release on the small screen, to say the least.
With a number of sites and permanently disgruntled fans that decided ages ago the series would be terrible, (likely false) cancellation rumors started to pile up even before its season 1 premiere. Now, roughly one month after a strong season finale that capped a notable second half of the season, Deadline and Variety are reporting that Disney and Lucasfilm have decided not to move forward with season 2.
No matter how you feel about The Acolyte and other Star Wars TV shows, the news arrives as a surprise, considering there aren’t many live-action Disney Plus Star Wars shows set to come after next December’s Skeleton Crew. Sure, Andor and Ahsoka have second seasons on their way, but now that The Mandalorian is heading to the big screen, it only felt logical to continue to flesh out the High Republic era with a recurring show that had an intriguing story arc planned out and the potential to fix many of its early mistakes.
Why was The Acolyte canceled?
The shared reports don’t include an official explanation for the cancellation (in fact, Disney and Lucasfilm have yet to comment on the breaking news), though that’s just usual business when it comes to shows being axed. We can, however, theorize why Disney and Lucasfilm have felt a second set of episodes wasn’t worth the hassle.
On Rotten Tomatoes, ‘The Acolyte’ ended up getting a strong-but-not-spectacular 78% approval rating from critics after 246 reviews. The audience score, meanwhile, only hit 18% at more than 25,000 ratings. Of course, anyone who’s spent some time online in the last few months is well aware of the smear campaign launched against the show, its creator, and the cast from the ‘Star Wars’ fandom’s worst sectors. Most of the complaints had little to do with the actual quality of the show, and were instead related to ‘Legends canon’ contradictions and downright sexist/racist mindsets.
That said, it’d be silly (and equally harmful to criticism) to assume everyone who didn’t enjoy the show belongs to those groups. We ourselves pointed out ‘The Acolyte’ really struggled with real tension and solid pacing early on. When shows budgeted at nearly $200 million that run for only eight episodes each season waste so much time in tepid setup, it’s no wonder the viewership ratings start to plummet before things get better.
From a business perspective, even as outsiders, we can infer that Disney and Lucasfilm simply didn’t see much of a point in putting more money into a big bet that hadn’t really paid off in the end. Of course, TV shows used to be allowed to grow and develop in the past, but in the streaming era, when the budgets are so bloated and the competition so fierce, you either have a big hit on your first try or you’re out. Moreover, Disney Plus continues to have growth pains in its post-COVID era, and the focus is — slowly but steadily — being shifted back to cinemas; you know, where money has always been made more easily.
What does ‘The Acolyte’s cancellation mean for the future of Star Wars?
As it stands, Star Wars has officially announced four new, separate movies to be in active development: Jon Favreau’s ‘The Mandalorian & Grogu,’ a Rey-centric sequel post-‘Rise of Skywalker,’ a Dave Filoni-directed event movie that will tie everything that’s transpired in the on-screen New Republic era up, and James Mangold’s Jedi origins standalone.
‘The Mandalorian & Grogu,’ regardless of the end result, is essentially a reworked fourth season of ‘The Mandalorian’ that signals the major shift in Disney’s overall strategy. All the others sound far more interesting, but we’ve yet to see significant progress made on any of them.
On top of those, ‘The Mandalorian’ and ‘Thor‘s Taika Waititi and ‘Deadpool & Wolverine‘s Shawn Levy are supposedly developing other projects, but those seem even more uncertain than the other four, as Lucasfilm appears to be very careful with what moves forward and what doesn’t following Episode IX’s negative reception in 2019.
Meanwhile, the TV side of things only has ‘Skeleton Crew,’ ‘Andor’ season 2, and ‘Ahsoka’ season 2 lined up if we leave Lucasfilm Animation out of the slate. There’s no reason to say at this point that live-action Star Wars shows are slowly fizzling out, but we believe the plan is to bring the franchise back to the big screen and see how it goes before fully defining the next decade or so.
Of course, developing both shows and movies takes a lot of time, so things might slow down after ‘Ahsoka’ season 2, as we haven’t received new live-action series announcements during 2024’s D23 event.
Regardless of the business decision that probably explains it, ‘The Acolyte’s cancellation will be fueling online debate for months and is already nurturing an ugly side of the ‘Star Wars’ fandom that Disney and Lucasfilm should avoid pleasing if possible.
From a more cultural point of view, this kind of move reminds us of what went down after ‘The Last Jedi‘s release in 2017 and the resulting mess that was its J.J. Abrams-helmed follow-up, which managed to please almost no one after the executives and creatives overthought who the movies were for. Let’s hope this doesn’t mean another whole decade of more stormtroopers and TIE fighters.