Credit: LucasfilmWhether you loved it or hated it, the end of The Acolyte is a huge deal for the Star Wars universe.
You don’t need to be a major Star Wars fan to know that the franchise has been on shaky ground in recent years. While the sequel trilogy may have made big bucks at the box office, it was also incredibly divisive within the fandom, with its second and third installments – Star Wars: The Last Jedi (2017) and Star Wars: Rise of Skywalker (2019) – proving particularly controversial.
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In fact, since The Walt Disney Company purchased Lucasfilm in 2012, pretty much every Star Wars project has generated some degree of drama.
A common consensus among a significant portion of the fandom is that Disney has floundered to understand the universe and legacy characters like Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill) and Han Solo (Harrison Ford) quite like its creator, George Lucas, ever did (a debatable point, considering how much people hated the prequel trilogy 20 years ago).
A lot of fans have pinned the blame on Lucasfilm President Kathleen Kennedy. Stepping into the company the same year that Disney took over, it’s understandable why her position would make her the scapegoat for some fans’ frustrations.
At the same time, however, a lot of the hate thrown Kennedy’s way focuses on how the franchise has expanded in terms of inclusivity in recent years – such as making Rey (Daisy Ridley), a female character, the lead of the prequels.
If you need more proof of this matter, just see pretty much every online conversation around the franchise’s newest Disney+ series, The Acolyte. Debuting on Disney+ earlier this summer, some fans had decided to hate the show before it even aired due to the fact that its lead, Amandla Stenberg, is Black, uses she/they pronouns, and a member of the LGBTQ+ community, while its showrunner, Leslye Headland, is also openly queer.
Once it premiered, The Acolyte was subjected to a relentless barrage of review-bombing on Rotten Tomatoes. This didn’t improve as the show went on, with some fans blowing very real criticisms of the show (such as its slow pacing and reliance on heavy exposition) out of proportion to meet their narrative that the show was the worst thing to ever happen in a galaxy far, far away. (For the record, it isn’t).
Some fans also took offense to plot points such as the lead characters, Mae and Osha (both played by Amandla Stenberg), being born of the Force, which they argued made Anakin Skywalker (Hayden Christensen) less special. They also complained about the Jedi being portrayed as morally gray (despite the fact that that very concept was arguably introduced by Lucas himself in the prequels).
Despite debuting to strong numbers, viewership declined as the show went on. The Acolyte dropped out of analytics company Samba TV’s top 10 weekly streaming list after its first three episodes. Just over a month after the finale aired on Disney+, sources confirmed to Deadline that the show was axed for good.
Whether you loved or hated the show, its impact on the Star Wars universe in general is significant. Much has already been made of the decline in viewership for Star Wars shows on Disney+, with even The Mandalorian – currently the crown jewel of the franchise – suffering a dip in its third season.
While it would be easy to claim that Lucasfilm made the decision in the wake of fan backlash of the show’s supposedly “woke” sentiments, we’d argue otherwise. Disney has ended plenty of its Star Wars shows after one season without feeling the need to confirm that they’re dead and buried.
The Book of Boba Fett, for example, has never received an official cancellation. In fact, even before The Acolyte aired, there were rumors that Disney had already decided it would only be a limited series.
As per Daniel RPK, this is part of a larger pattern of Disney slimming down its Star Wars TV offerings. “Lando is now a film, Rangers of the New Republic was canceled, Andor will end with S2, no Mando S4, no Boba Fett S2, no Acolyte S2, Skeleton Crew is a limited series,” he recently wrote on X (formerly known as Twitter).
“Ahsoka is the only ongoing Star Wars show. No other live-action series has been announced for development.”
Lando is now a film, Rangers of the New Republic was canceled, Andor will end with S2, no Mando S4, no Boba Fett S2, no Acolyte S2, Skeleton Crew is a limited series. Ahsoka is the only ongoing Star Wars show. No other live action series has been announced for development.
— Daniel Richtman (@DanielRPK) August 21, 2024
Considering the amount Disney hyped up its Star Wars offerings when Disney+ first launched, this is a pretty sad state of affairs. Just like its other big franchise, the Marvel Cinematic Universe, the studio seems to have pulled back from oversaturating the market with Star Wars content.
Unlike Marvel, however, which has multiple films in production (or heading into production), there’s not an awful lot going on for Star Wars theatrically right now. The Mandalorian & Grogu is filming right now. Daisy Ridley’s much-discussed (but still unwritten) return as Rey is going to start filming in… Well, who knows. Plenty of Star Wars projects have been announced, but whether or not they actually get much further than that remains to be seen.
After all, it’s a common trend at Lucasfilm to announce and hype up films only to never film them and act like they never existed years later. (Remember Taika Waititi’s Star Wars film and Rian Jonson’s trilogy?)
While the MCU is being slimmed down to two or three films per year, max, Star Wars will be lucky to hit two or three films per decade at this rate. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Lucasfilm was at risk of watering down the brand with too many projects in such a short space of time.
While we wouldn’t say that Disney is trying to cancel Star Wars, per se, it does feel like a shift is happening that will see Disney gradually phase out Star Wars from a tentpole franchise to more of a legacy IP that only returns when it has something new worth saying. If that’s what it takes to get the franchise back on track, we’re not complaining.
How do you think Disney can fix its Star Wars problem?