It’s Not Just Review-Bombing: ‘The Acolyte’ Losses 31% of Estimated “Minutes Watched” Following Episode 4

‘Star Wars: The Acolyte’ premiered 3 weeks ago, and even before its premiere the show was quite controversial with its premise, and some statements that cast members and creators gave to the public. Soon after its premiere, the show turned out to be a classic example of both review-bombing and review-boosting. Critics gave it unreasonable high scores while fans gave it unreasonable low scores.

Currently, the show has 85% on Rotten Tomatoes when it comes to critics score and a 14% audience score, but as it turns out the streaming numbers have started to reflect the dissatisfaction that fans feel for the show.

Soon after its premiere, Disney was happy to flaunt the numbers that the show was streamed 11 million times in its first 5 days, (lower than ‘Ahsoka’ number, by much, which was streamed 14 million times) and then following the highly controversial episode 3 the show was watched for 380.5 million minutes (estimated number) becoming 6th most streamed TV show in June 7th-June 13th week.

This is of course according to Variety’s Luminate data. Now following the release of episode 4, which somehow turned out to be even more controversial than episode 3, mostly due to canon breaking, the show apparently lost 31% of “minutes streamed” stats.

As you can see it’s been estimated that ‘The Acolyte’ has been streamed for 262 million minutes over the course of the past week (June 14-June 20) which is a 31% change. The show previously held the sixth place when it comes to most watched shows and now it’s on the seventh spot.

The biggest winner for the week was definitely once again Bridgerton, which received a 419% boost. So what’s going on here?

If the streaming numbers continue to decrease, It’s quite a big sign that fans don’t like what Disney is selling, at least a good portion of the fans. You can still make a case that fans are just avoiding the show because it is “woke” (it’s not that woke…). But it’s most likely that fans are insulted by the recent changes that the show introduced to the canon.

Episode 4 introduced Ki-Adi-Mundi, from ‘Phantom Menace’ despite the fact that the character shouldn’t be alive during the events of ‘The Acolyte’ with them taking place 100 years before the movie. There’s also the introduction of Sith Lord in the final moments of Episode 4, and Jedi clearly confronting him. The sweet irony here is that it was Mundi’s character in the ‘Phantom Menace’ that said that “Sith have been extinct for nearly a millennia” clearly forgetting about Mae’s master.

We still have 4 episodes to watch, and I’m sure that the show will explain at least a portion of confusing things, until the end, we can’t really say whether ‘The Acolyte’ flopped or not.

What do you think? Let us know in the comments below!

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