The Acolyte cancellation proves it – the world is bored with Star Wars

Star Wars fans once watched any old rubbish if lightsabers were involved. But, as Disney has found out the hard way, that’s no longer true

The lights have gone out on the latest Star Wars TV series The Acolyte, with Disney announcing it is cancelling the £140 million show after just one season. Disney’s custodianship of Star Wars has been erratic ever since it paid George Lucas £3 billion for his Galaxy Far Far Away in 2012 – but even by those standards, the premature end to The Acolyte is regarded as a shock. 
The Acolyte has, to put it mildly, divided Star Wars fans. The brainchild of Emmy-nominated showrunner Leslye Headland, has made history as the first queer person to oversee a Star Wars property. The series stars – or starred – non-binary actor Amandla Stenberg as Force-powered twin sisters Mae and Osha. Squid Game star Lee Jung-Jae – who learned English especially for the part – played a Jedi while Jodie Turner-Smith and Margarita Levieva starred as the same-sex “parents” of Mae and Osha. (Although we later learnt that the Force had magically conceived the children.) 
The series ended its eight-episode run on July 16 and concluded on a massive cliffhanger in which Osha killed her teacher, Sol. But the questions raised by the finale are now destined to float off into deep space after Kathleen Kennedy, who, as head of Disney’s Lucasfilm division, has direct control over Star Wars, pulled the plug. At a per-episode budget of around £17 million – more than Game of Thrones in its dragon-tastic prime – the Acolyte is potentially the most embarrassing flop yet for Kennedy and Disney. To paraphrase noted media commentator Obi-Wan Kenobi, this wasn’t the blockbusting spin-off Star Wars audience was looking for. 
There is a long-running cliche that nobody hates Star Wars more than Star Wars fans. They’ve certainly made a spectator sport out of grumbling about the new era for the saga that began with JJ Abrams’s The Force Awakens in 2015. But for all their whingeing about those movies and Daisy Ridley’s Rey – a heroine without any apparent flaws – the fans were generally willing to put bum to seat and watch whatever Disney was serving up. Even 2019’s Rise of Skywalker, the widely disliked final entry in the “Sequels Trilogy”,  performed respectably by exceeding $1 billion at the box office.
Audiences’ willingness to watch any old rubbish so long as lightsabers are involved has sharply declined, however, as Disney and Lucasfilm have moved away from the big screen and retooled Star Wars as a key element of their streaming service. This melting away of the viewership reached a critical mass with The Acolyte, which saw its ratings collapse week by week – a death spiral regarded as central to Disney’s decision to put it out of its misery. 
The Acolyte premiered in June with the biggest opening audience for a Disney+ debut this year, with 2.94  million viewers for episodes one and two across their first two days of release. According to one report, that was followed by a stark decline  – viewership for episode three was down 22 per cent, while part four, which arrived as The Acolyte, should have been building momentum, dipped another nine per cent. The Acolyte bounced back slightly for the finale – but too late. By then, the interstellar jig was up. 
As an addition to the Star Wars canon, The Acolyte was far from a disaster. Its lightsaber duels – a must-have for any Star Wars spin-off – were brilliantly choreographed. And it shed light on an unexplored chapter of the franchise’s timeline, taking place in the glory days of the Jedi Knights, decades before the Old Republic was toppled from within by the loathsome Emperor Palpatine and his heavy-breathing sidekick Darth Vader. 
It is also true that much of the backlash was homophobic and racist. The internet is a cesspit, and toxicity runs particularly deep among fans of big franchises. Such prejudices were seen as fuelling the “review bombing” of The Acolyte, which involved organised naysayers targeting review websites such as Rotten Tomatoes with negative write-ups of The Acolyte.
But even without the trolls, it is no shock that The Acolyte failed to chime with the Star Wars audience. It was dark and dreary, with a plodding pace and a cast of characters united in their desire to mope through every scene. That obviously contrasts Lucas’s original Star Wars trilogy, inspired by his love of the old Flash Gordon matinees of his youth and which had a zinging sense of derring-do. 
A sense of fun was likewise the defining feature of The Mandalorian, the one show to chime with Disney+ subscribers. In its first two seasons, The Mandalorian had one big selling point—the adorable Baby Yoda, aka Grogu. The cheeky green cherub eclipsed even the original Star Wars cast in popularity and proved there was a future for the franchise after the dire Sequel Trilogy, which had finished with The Rise of Skywalker. 
Baby Yoda should have been the start of a new chapter. Instead, it came to be seen as a huge missed opportunity. Rather than build on that momentum and give us more of what we liked – a feel-good space opera with likeable heroes and fun action scenes – Disney decided to test the patience of its audience. 
The first sign something was amiss came in December 2021 when it launched a terrible spin-off, The Book of Boba Fett, instead of season three of The Mandalorian. Cheap-looking and slow-moving, it burned through all the goodwill generated by Grogu.
Worse was to come with Ewan McGregor’s Obi-Wan Kenobi, which suffered from flimsy plotting and an underwhelming confrontation between McGregor’s Obi-Wan and former student Darth Vader. The downward spiral accelerated with Ahsoka, in which Rosario Dawson played a fan-favourite character from the Star Wars cartoons. All of these experienced fast-declining ratings –  a trend that gathered pace with The Acolyte, which was stuffed with “deep cut” easter eggs lost on 99 per cent of casual Star Wars watchers. 
It hasn’t been all bad. Baby Yoda is set for the big screen with a movie to be directed by Iron Man’s Jon Favreau and Daisy Ridley takes up the mantle of Rey in a new feature due for 2026. Sandwiched between all those awful shows meanwhile was the wonderfully gritty Andor, from Michael Clayton writer Tony Gilroy.
Asking the question “what would Star Wars look like if reimagined as serious TV for grown-ups?” it featured a compelling performance by Diego Luna as a smuggler drawn into the early years of the Rebellion against the Galactic Empire. As with The Acolyte and Obi-Wan, ratings were less than stellar, but the reviews were positive, and the hardcore fans loved it. 
Andor returns in 2025, and Disney will no doubt be hoping it helps restore some of the credibility lost by The Acolyte and unlikely to be regained by the forthcoming Star Wars: Skeleton Crew – a Spielberg-ish teen-oriented series starring Jude Law as, you guessed it, a Jedi. (A Lando Calrissian spin-off, set to star Donald Glover, was put out of its misery before filming began.) 
In the meantime, Kathleen Kennedy and her executives will surely have to rethink their entire Star Wars strategy. New films from the likes of Taika Waititi and Deadpool & Wolverine director Shawn Levy are supposedly appearing at some point. But they’d better come up with something other than yet another boring Jedi duel. 
George Lucas’s movies filled viewers with wonder and enthusiasm – it is not by accident that the original 1976 Star Wars was later re-titled A New Hope. The Acolyte, by contrast, was all about glum space knights mooching about. Take note, Disney: Star Wars only really works if it’s soaring through space at speed.