We Finally Got a Reason Why ‘The Acolyte’ Was Cancelled & It Was Clear All Along

‘Star Wars: The Acolyte’ is the most recent installment in the franchise. The show generated plenty of controversy even before it was released, and things only got so much worse when it finally premiered.

The show premiered with decent numbers slightly lower than ‘Ahsoka’s’ the entire premise however was blown soon after the release of Episode 2, and the show never recovered.

Several social media movements have been started by the fans in attempts to resurrect the show. The hashtag #SaveTheAcolyte is trending on X, the petition has been started on Change.org in an attempt to persuade Disney into renewing the show and it currently stands on more than 49,000 signatures.

While those efforts are commendable, we previously covered why they are unlikely to work, you can read our separate report here. Now it’s clear why ‘The Acolyte’ was canceled for anyone who spent 10 minutes watching the show. It was of extremely poor quality with some questionable narrative choices mixed in.

However, the official reason was never given by Disney or Lucasfilm. Now industry insider Jeff Sneider reported on the reasons why the show was canceled via his sources:

The first reason is low viewership. This was as clear as day, as someone who has been following the show and the numbers from day one, I can report that the stats kept shrinking week after week, as I’ve mentioned before the show premiered with decent numbers, but ultimately 5 or 6 weeks in it disappeared from the “top 10 list” altogether, according to Luminate’s data.

Now some sites and media in general tried hyping up the show, even going as far as to call it the second-most popular Star Wars show based on “interactions,” I’ve explained in a separate post why these numbers were heavily wrongly presented in order to appear more favorable for the show, while in reality, those “interactions” were negative in nature.

Second, the show apparently costs $630K per minute of screentime, also something that I’ve analyzed on two separate occasions, it seems impossible that ‘The Acolyte’ had a budget of $180M, but apparently it’s true. Nothing about the show reflected its budget, except for those few lightsaber scenes that had the potential to save the show.

Ultimately Sneider only confirmed what we already knew, the show was a major loss for Disney and Lucasfilm. Even with such a high budget and relatively low viewership, the show did have a hope of being renewed, just look at ‘Andor’ it has the lowest viewership and the highest budget. The difference is, that ‘Andor’ was a critical success but when it comes to critics and audiences this is something that the studio wants to invest in.

Ultimately, fans were afraid that ‘The Acolyte’ would go down in infamy just like ‘Willow,’ – according to Sneider that won’t happen. ‘Willow’ was removed from Disney+ less than six months after it was released, ‘The Acolyte’ won’t go down that path.

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