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Credit: Inside the MagicJust a few weeks ago, we heard that a second season of Lucasfilm’s upcoming Star Wars series was already in the works. Now, an industry insider claims the opposite.
A source recently told That Park Place that Leslye Headland’s new Star Wars series, The Acolyte – which debuts on Disney+ on June 4 – will not be getting a second series, effectively canceling the show before it even airs.
“Leslye Headland’s The Acolyte is DoA [dead on arrival]. Unless there’s a miracle of ratings, this is a one-and-done proposition,” the source said. “It looks to me like John Knoll is no longer going to be actively meeting with Headland to collaborate on [series two].”
Knoll is the Executive Creative Director and Senior VFX Supervisor at Industrial Light & Magic, the motion picture visual effects company that forms a part of Lucasfilm.
Earlier this month, Headland told Collider that The Acolyte was “definitely pitched it as a multi-season show.” She also claimed that several threads are left unresolved by the end of the first season and that she has a timeline for each storyline. “I have a lot of ideas,” she said, “and again, a lot of it was stuff that I told Kathleen [Kennedy, President of Lucasfilm] early on, in terms of where I would like the season to go, and the conflicts that I see happening, specifically in the second season.”
What – if anything – has changed between then and now remains to be seen. Generally, fan reactions to The Acolyte footage have been extremely positive. While its first trailer currently boasts over half a million dislikes on YouTube, the insider claims that Lucasfilm is dismissing this as the work of trolls and not as a genuine indication of public sentiment towards the show.
At the same time, Lucasfilm is allegedly wary of its streaming future. “Live action Disney+ Star Wars is very quiet matching to what it was just 2 years ago,” the insider told That Park Place.”
The numbers certainly back up these claims. In January, Nielsen data revealed that season three of The Mandalorian racked up 12.3 billion minutes of viewing time in 2023 – approximately 2 billion minutes less viewing time compared to the second season of The Mandalorian in 2020, which earned 14.519 billion minutes.
Earlier this year, it was revealed that a fourth season of the show was on pause (if not canceled entirely) and that The Mandalorian would instead shift to the big screen with The Mandalorian & Grogu.
Set a century before the events of Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace (1999), The Acolyte will explore life in the sunset days of the High Republic, with Amandla Stenberg starring as Mae – a former Padawan who is now a dangerous warrior – who encounters Sol (Lee Jung-jae), a Jedi Master investigating a series of crimes across the galaxy.
Do you have high hopes for The Acolyte? Let us know in the comments!