Every media conglomerate remembers its first time, the day it canceled its first Star Wars show. Why, it seems like only yesterday that a pre-Disney ABC was pulling Droids and then Ewoks from the schedule. The mid-’80s. Heady times.
Today, Disney has become an adult, a Disney Adult, if you will. After allowing Star Wars TV shows to walk all over its streaming service for the last five years, Disney is putting its foot down. While fan-servicing Easter egg hunts like The Book Of Boba Fett and Obi-Wan Kenobi were given the smash-and-grab freedom of a one-and-done season, The Acolyte is the first to be outright canceled by Disney. That’s only surprising because it’s the first time people have talked about a Star Wars anything since Andor.
To be clear, online chatter doesn’t mean there’s a massive audience. Per Deadline, Acolyte had a pretty steep drop off in terms of minutes spent watching the show. The finale aired about a month ago and is “believed to be the lowest [rated] for a Star Wars series finale.” Neilsen’s streaming charts show Acolyte falling out of the top 10 within three weeks, so that gives plenty of justification to the Disney brass, who live in fear of another Last Jedi situation, to ax the show. Unfortunately, Acolyte is the only Star Wars series since Andor to try and expand the galaxy, which has been reduced to Dave Filloni’s live-action Clone Wars sequel apparatus.
Acolyte was always destined to be a lightning rod for controversy. Breaking the first few commandments of Star Wars, it focused on women and people of color, played with Jedi lore, had “space witches,” and showed off Manny Jacinto’s abs. There was also an uproar over showrunner Lesly Headland very seriously calling R2-D2 a lesbian, which caused a million reply guys to suddenly cry out in terror and get responses from bots saying, “░P░U░S░S░Y░I░N░B░I░O░.”
All of this is pretty predictable. In addition to producing television at unsustainable budgets, including this $180 million Star Wars series that probably needs some time to figure itself out but costs too much to figure itself out, Disney is hamstrung by fans demanding a very narrow and specific type of Star Wars show that plays to the retrofitted lore of the prequel and sequel trilogies, and honestly, it seems like they barely like those. That makes Andor the exception that proves the rule.
Fan service will only take Disney so far as long as they’re only servicing one type of fan because, at a certain point, Disney will have to replenish its vast army of Star Wars obsessives. Some fans, the ones who were six and seven when The Force Awakens came out, will have grown up with things like The Last Jedi and The Acolyte. Those will be their prequel trilogy, controversial installments to anyone but those who saw them as children. To quote a great man who has probably never seen The Acolyte: “It’s like poetry. They rhyme.”