Revisiting The Inferno Of ‘The Acolyte,' A Year Later

Forbes

15 hours ago

The Acolyte was an experiment for Disney, a first attempt to take its live-action projects fully outside the Skywalker era in a meaningful way, flinging the timeline back a hundred years to The High Republic. Disney had mined that period in print since it bought Star Wars, but live-action was the next step.
It failed. Like the show or hate it, it failed. Despite ending with many loose ends and huge implications for the Star Wars universe, Disney cancelled it. And that was a year ago this week.
Looking at just the math alone, it's hard to argue this wasn't inevitable. The Acolyte cost an absolutely absurd $230 million, making it one of the most expensive per-episode shows on TV. That A) was not very visible onscreen B) it was the lowest-viewed Disney Plus Star Wars series at the time and C) it was ridiculous for Disney to believe a show in a new era starring all new characters could put up any viewership that would justify that cost. I'm more than convinced that the also-expensive, also little-watched Andor (at least in season 1), would have possibly been cancelled had they not secured a two-season deal up front.
All this said, it sucks this happened. And everything that followed. The Acolyte was an okay show that ended pretty well and in the middle you could glimpse some true greatness. I will maintain that episode 5 of the series, one which The Stranger butchers an entire platoon of Jedi, including a number of characters that in no way seemed at risk, is a top 3 lightsaber fight in the history of Star Wars.
The rest was just alright. I was never able to fully get on board with the 'Force Twins' concept, even as it would end up hinting as to how Anakin Skywalker was conceived. You could very much see the enormous wastes of money like a starfighter chase that did not need to exist in a show where its best moments were a lightsaber fight in the woods or two people talking in a cave. It's hard to imagine a second season would need to cost anywhere close to that.
It would have been creatively interesting to see more, at any price. Manny Jacinto's The Stranger, in particular, was one of the best original villains we've seen appear in Star Wars in the entire Disney era, and now he's lost to the sands of time with no Acolyte, and no more confirmed High Republic projects coming.
We cannot get through this without mentioning the absolutely insane hate the show, its star and its showrunner got. At one point it became an entire industry to print out YouTube videos positively bathing in bile about the show, ranging from thousands of views to hundreds of thousands. It completely drowned the conversation about the show on social media, as even mentioning The Acolyte would quickly devolve into shouting about wokeness and ruining canon.
Upon closer inspection by people who actually understood Star Wars, it was in fact the case that each thing brought up never actually broke canon, something showrunner Leslye Headland worked to make sure was the case. At a certain point, none of it made sense unless you dug into the ugly side of it, as no one took more hate than Amandla Stenberg, the star who visibly and self-admittedly took an immense amount of racial harassment during the course of the show, to which critics said 'no she didn't,' as if that was some sort of counter.
The Acolyte was the most-hated Star Wars project I've ever seen, and this is a world where The Last Jedi exists. I think debates about The Last Jedi are more widespread because a lot more people watched that movie. But per capita in terms of Acolyte viewership, it's not especially close. The Acolyte is no better or worse than half of Disney-era productions, and yet it was treated like it was turning George Lucas to ash where he stood.
In the wake of cancellation, there was in fact a 'Save The Acolyte' movement from the fans who fought valiantly against the hate campaigns and just wanted more. If anything, they were more mad at Disney than anyone, and believed they caved to those groups and shelved the show.
Is that the case? I mean, I don't think Disney was deaf to all this, but if this was a cheap show putting up big numbers, I don't think any of it would have mattered. Instead, Disney allowed a colossally bloated budget to feed into a show that needed its first season to find its legs. It was set up to fail. Again, that could have been true with Andor, the no-name characters, the massive cost, the low viewership, but the show had a two season deal and, more importantly, was the single best Star Wars content ever produced short of (I would argue) two of the three OT movies. The Acolyte, even if you liked it, wasn't anywhere close to that, clearly.
Disney seems paralyzed with Star Wars right now. The only movie that we are 100% seeing soon is The Mandalorian and Grogu, the show spin-off and possible finale. Ahsoka will get a second season three years(!) after the first. Andor is over. The Acolyte is dead and I think most people forgot or didn't realize Skeleton Crew existed (which is a shame). It feels like Disney is not going to take any creative risks for the foreseeable future. Hopefully that changes with Dawn of the Jedi, an upcoming movie that will take place 25,000 years in the past, but I will believe that will make it to the finish line when I'm sitting in theaters. Fool me eight times, and all that.
The Acolyte was a strange, short chapter in Star Wars history. I think it's worth watching once. I think it's a shame we won't get to see where it was trying to go. I think the hate it got was so wildly out of proportion it's hard to take anyone who participated in that seriously again. But I think it was always going to die like this with that kind of budget and an impossible viewership demand to match Disney's idiotic expectations.
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Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.