Even After Episode 5 Improvements ‘The Acolyte’ Keeps Losing Viewers According to Latest Numbers

This week’s episode of ‘The Acolyte’ improved pretty much every aspect of the story. It finally advanced the story, we’ve seen some pretty good action, and some canon-breaking instances are less likely to ultimately come to pass.

The episode received less backlash than usual, with some fans who disliked the show having a minor change of heart, mostly due to impressive action sequences and the somewhat unexpected and brutal direction the show took.

We’ve reported that following the release of Episode 5, the show managed to reclaim one meager point when it comes to audience ratings on Rotten Tomatoes and overall score on IMDb. However, it seems that it wasn’t enough to draw in what actually counts: viewers.

Between June 13 and June 20, the show has seen a 31% drop in “minutes watched” stats based on Variety’s Luminate data. Many fans came to the defense claiming that this was due to episode 4 being shorter in general. The argument makes sense, although the drop wouldn’t be so drastic.

Now following the release of Episode 5, the stats are even lower, ‘The Acolyte’ lost 11 % of “minutes watched” and is now looking at 9th place when it comes to top streamed shows over the course of the last week, falling from 232.2M minutes watched to 262M.

This is unfortunate news since the show really did improve some core aspects, but for a large number of fans this seems to be the case of “Too Little Too Late.”

So what could be the reason for this nose dive in popularity? Well, keep in mind that the theories I’m going to present are my speculations alone. The show took too long to actually be good. The first two episodes were in my opinion “meh.” The third episode was nonsensical, and episode 4 can be summed up as “nothing happened they walked all over the jungle for 30 minutes.” The show initially had pacing issues and dialogue issues, and it’s likely that some portion of the fans just gave up on it. Waiting for 5 episodes to include action and an intriguing story is just a tad bit too late.

Then there’s also that huge canon scandal that took place in episode 4, with the appearance of Ki-Adi-Mundi which shouldn’t be possible, and the appearance of Sith Lord which threatened to break the canon set up in ‘The Phantom Menace.’

It’s possible that some fans were too insulted to continue with the show and did not even attempt to watch episode 5 which sort of remedied the issue. In my opinion, we can’t blame this one on review bombing and various types of backlash, those types of fans wouldn’t wait for 5 episodes to ditch the show, they weren’t watching it from the beginning, thanks to some unfortunate PR strategies to blame the show’s lack of quality on toxic fans (which are present but are certainly a minority.

Perhaps, next week’s numbers will reflect the improvements made in Episode 5. Headland already teased that episodes 5 & 8 will uncover more information about Qimir aka The Master / The Stranger, so we’re definitely looking forward to that.

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