The Star Wars Show That “Didn’t Have the Ratings” Continues to Find Its Audience on Streaming
Nearly two years after Lucasfilm decided to pull the plug on The Acolyte, the infamous series keeps doing the one thing that Disney thought it was incapable of: getting watched.
According to FlixPatrol charts, the High Republic-era series quietly slid back into Disney Plus’s most watched series in the United States last week.
Sure, it’s not the kind of dominance you see from fresh arrivals, but for a show that was framed as a creative and commercial misfire (and I agree the former wholeheartedly) the fact that it can still bring people back is quite telling.
Of course, it’s worth noting that the resurgence wasn’t so random. As you might know, Dave Filoni’s animated series about the former Sith Lord Darth Maul has just hit the platform, so Star Wars is back on everyone’s radar after a conspicuous absent.
There’s also the fact that Star Wars: Maul – Shadow Lord and The Acolyte share the same thematic DNA with dark side mysticism and morally compromised Force users, so it’s not such a stretch to assume that some were curious enough to give it another go.
The problem with Acolyte was never ratings
At the end of the day, the thing that killed The Acolyte might not have been viewing figures, but the overall critical reception and the show’s bloated budget. The Acolyte, after all, debuted with 4.8 million views on its first day, and went on to become Disney’s second most-watched original of 2024 behind Percy Jackson and the Olympians with 2.673 billion viewing minutes.
That’s not a number to scoff at, though as Disney co-chairman Alan Bergman said in a 2024 interview with Vulture, the problem was never performance, but the astronomical cost. For its first 8-episode outing, The Acolyte spent a whopping $230 million. Sure, the series looked great and included some ambitious set pieces, but some $30 million per episode is not sustainable in the age of streaming and with this business model.
This resurgence doesn’t mean Disney is going to greenlight a second season now, but it does keep complicating the official postmortem.
The series that split audiences and picked a fight with Star Wars lore
I’ve been a fan of Star Wars for almost 20 years, and in all of that time, the one thing I realized about this fictional universe and its fandom is this immutable fact, this galactic constant of franchise-killing proportions: Nobody hates Star Wars as much as Star Wars fans.
I’m not saying this to be glib. Such is the depth and diversity of the Star Wars universe that it’s almost a Sisyphean task to write a new story that everyone can get behind. And whenever you try to expand on that established lore, you run the risk of incurring the so-called wrath of the faithful.
That being said, The Acolyte was hardly a unique offender in that regard. No, the problem was, and still is, the fact the series just isn’t very good, and certainly doesn’t deliver on its own ambitions. Whether it’s the script, which is, on a scene-by-scene level, kind of a mess, or the strange directing and editing choices that admittedly plague a lot of other streaming shows these days, the show was fighting an uphill battle from the start.
Of course I want to know how Darth Plagueis came to power. Of course the idea of morally compromised and hypocritical Jedi is worth exploring. But the ideas were never the problem. It was the execution.
Just take a look at Andor. The same franchise, the same ambitions, and the same willingness to make Star Wars fans uncomfortable — except it actually works.
The Acolyte wasn’t good enough to save. It might just be interesting enough, though, to outlast its own cancellation, if these viewing patterns are anything to go by.
(featured image: Disney+)
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