Credit: LucasfilmIt’s official: Star Wars fans finally like something.
It is a hard and unfortunate truth that Star Wars fans are a pretty cantankerous bunch. At the very least, it has to be acknowledged that the fandom has a disproportionately loud and regressive faction that dislikes it whenever the franchise from a galaxy far, far away tries anything new (like having a slightly different kind of protagonist than they’re used to) or doesn’t something new enough (see: the entire Disney sequel trilogy).
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This trend of Star Wars fan hatred may have hit its apex with The Acolyte, the recent Disney+ show created by Leslye Headland and starring Amandla Stenberg and Lee Jung-jae.
The show was the first of its kind to feature a cast of (mostly) POC and was heavily promoted as having a darker, more morally ambiguous portrayal of the Jedi Order pre-Phantom Menace (1999). Notoriously, it also featured a few characters quickly dubbed “lesbian space witches.”
Every episode of The Acolyte was review-bombed to smithereens, sometimes within minutes of being released on Disney+. While Lucasfilm has not officially announced the series has been canceled, there do not appear to be any plans for a second season, and even the cast members appear to be taking it for granted that the show is no more.
While some blame for the apparent cancellation can be placed on the haters (not to mention the horrendously huge budget), it also simply may be that Lucasfilm has other irons in the galactic fire. Aside from The Mandalorian & Grogu and New Jedi Order movies currently in the works, the studio recently released LEGO Star Wars: Rebuild the Galaxy, which scored 100% on Rotten Tomatoes.
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That pretty much means it’s “universally beloved,” which are not words used to describe the franchise all that often these days. This new LEGO Star Wars is much lower profile than, say, The Acolyte or Ahsoka, but also seems to have neatly dodged the controversies surrounding those series.
It was created by Dan Hernandez & Benji Samit, with direction by Chris Buckley, and follows a humble nerf herder named Sig Greebling (Gaten Matarazzo) who inadvertently finds himself rewriting the very fabric of reality with a Jedi artifact, as one does. Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill), Darth Jar Jar (Ahmed Best), and various other characters show up in new and changed forms.
Rebuild the Galaxy is a four-part miniseries, so it is anyone’s guess whether it will receive another batch of episodes. But considering this is the first Star Wars project in a long time that everyone agrees is pretty good, we won’t be surprised.
Have you watched Rebuild the Galaxy yet? Is it “universally beloved?”