The Acolyte’s Squandered Potential
The show brought a whole new set of fans to a stagnating franchise. Its cancellation suggests Star Wars is only interested in looking backwards.
by Gavia Baker-Whitelaw
Production still via Disney+.
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For a few weeks this summer, The Acolyte inspired a sense of revitalization in the Star Wars fandom. With its inventive setting, diverse cast, and unashamed focus on romance, the show—which began its 8-episode run in early June—felt like a belated apology for Disney's tacit rejection of The Last Jedi. Star Wars was finally looking forward instead of back. (Metaphorically speaking, anyway. The Acolyte takes place a century before The Phantom Menace.)
Unlike the rest of Disney’s Star Wars television fare, The Acolyte didn’t rely on familiar characters or nostalgic callbacks. Instead, it introduced a fresh ensemble cast with no relation to the Skywalker Saga, exploring an underutilized subtext from the movies: the tempting possibility of a gray area between the light and dark sides of the force.
Centering on a sexually charged conflict between a former Jedi padawan (Amandla Stenberg) and a mysterious darksider (Manny Jacinto), The Acolyte openly capitalized on Reylo’s popular enemies-to-lovers dynamic—the romance between Kylo Ren and Rey in the most recent film trilogy—something the franchise had previously failed to do. And while its ratings were lower than shows in the franchise led by established characters, it inspired feverish enthusiasm from viewers who weren’t otherwise invested in Star Wars. In other words, it successfully injected new blood into a stagnating franchise.
And then, this past Monday, it got summarily cancelled. Coming only a month after the season 1 finale, this news symbolized something bigger than the demise of one TV show. It felt like a targeted message to the Star Wars fandom, signaling that new stories are not welcome here, and neither are new fans. Political in more ways than one, that message is destined to come back and bite Disney on the ass.
In a big-picture sense, the Star Wars franchise is currently focusing on brand conservation. This goes hand-in-hand with their pivot to TV in 2019, where the goal was to attract streaming subscribers for Disney+ and to use the platform as an accessible middle ground between tentpole movies and the nerdier tier of supplementary canon. But Disney has failed to produce any new films in the five years since The Rise of Skywalker, leaving Pedro Pascal’s Mandalorian as the defining Star Wars character of the 2020s.
So far, this TV output has been a) very expensive, and b) creatively kind of mid, consisting of six shows in five years: The Mandalorian and its spin-off The Book of Boba Fett; Obi-Wan Kenobi (which brought back Prequel Trilogy stars Ewan McGregor and Hayden Christensen); Ahsoka (a live-action spin-off for a popular cartoon character); Andor (tying into the movie Rogue One); and The Acolyte. Later this year, they’ll release a kids’ show titled Skeleton Crew (taking place around the same time as The Mandalorian), and after that there’s nothing new on the docket.
Aside from The Acolyte and Andor (an anti-fascist thriller with fantastic production values and dynamite writing) this TV slate is fundamentally conservative. Rooted in Original Trilogy nostalgia, its flagship show The Mandalorian is a conceptually unadventurous space Western, peppered with callbacks to the older movies. Meanwhile Ahsoka, Obi-Wan Kenobi, and The Book of Boba Fett are all star vehicles for fan-favorite characters, offering expanded screentime without rocking the canonical boat.
Taking place during a 10-year window on either side of the Original Trilogy’s canonical timeline, these shows exist in a narrative bubble, blocked from making bold decisions because the timeline itself is set in stone. Shaped by Lucasfilm’s Chief Creative Officer Dave Filoni and Disney stalwart Jon Favreau (The Mandalorian), the purpose of these shows is to maintain brand loyalty by replaying the hits.
The Acolyte stood out because it was the first series to take place in a lesser-known part of the timeline, emphasizing new characters, locations, and worldbuilding. More importantly from a fandom perspective, it’s also the first modern Star Wars spin-off to embrace romance. Unfolding in an accessible PG-13 format, the relationship between The Acolyte’s protagonist Osha and her nemesis/love-interest Qimir was a crucial part of the show’s appeal, with the cast and crew hyping up the romantic subtext and namechecking Reylo during interviews. Without stating it explicitly, this show was being marketed to women.
Before this summer, the otherwise risk-averse nature of the Star Wars TV slate felt like a reaction to The Last Jedi. Seven years on, Disney and Lucasfilm still haven’t figured out how to handle the fallout from TLJ: A critical and commercial success that was subsequently branded “divisive” thanks to relatively small right-wing backlash that was amplified into a major story by mainstream media coverage.
We don’t need to re-litigate the details of The Last Jedi controversy here, but the short explanation is that actors John Boyega and Kelly Marie Tran faced virulent racist harassment from a vocal minority of fans, overlapping with a more general backlash against director Rian Johnson’s irreverent storytelling choices. Disney and Lucasfilm ultimately capitulated to this hate campaign, concluding the sequel trilogy with The Rise of Skywalker, a film that sidelined Tran for no good reason, leaned into vacuous fanservice, and is now largely seen as an embarrassment.
Since TRoS in 2019, the creative leaders behind Star Wars have failed to settle upon a new direction. Various movies have been announced and then either postponed or cancelled, while the TV shows act as a kind of brand-conservation device. This franchise is treading water, and to strain the metaphor here, a whole cadre of Star Wars fans would rather drown in place than swim to new territory.
By foregrounding characters of color and pushing the boundaries of Star Wars canon, The Acolyte followed in the footsteps of The Last Jedi. It embraced female perspectives, critiqued the authoritarian nature of the Jedi Order, and enthusiastically portrayed its male lead as an object of sexual desire, both onscreen and in Manny Jacinto’s promo materials. The Acolyte had a queer female showrunner and a lot of female fans—so the resulting backlash was entirely predictable, positioning The Acolyte as the latest target for toxic culture-war bullshit.
It’s abundantly clear that for many participants, these “toxic fan” harassment campaigns are only tangentially about Star Wars or Lord of the Rings or whatever. It’s more about leveraging geek culture brands as recruitment tools for far-right messaging, as evidenced by Elon Musk smugly tweeting “go woke, go broke” at The Acolyte’s cancellation. He isn’t offering a meaningful criticism of the show, because he doesn’t have one. It’s just an easy shorthand for fanboy bigotry, and for the past decade, Disney has done little to discourage this corner of its own audience.
The most visible symptom of this cycle is the YouTube backlash ecosystem. On YouTube—the biggest platform for media criticism these days, for better or worse—the search results for The Acolyte are overwhelmingly negative. If you look up the show’s title or a neutral phrase like “The Acolyte review,” you’re met with a roster of lurid thumbnails labeling the show “a woke FLOP” and “complete GARBAGE,” or celebrating its cancellation with photoshopped images of Amandla Stenberg crying. We can safely assume these critics are not operating on good faith.
Popularized on the back of female-led blockbusters like Captain Marvel, this ugly little subgenre is an easy way for YouTube grifters to get ad revenue by degrading women and people of color. Anyone with an ounce of Gamergate experience can recognize this M.O. at a thousand paces. Unfortunately, though, it’s had a demonstrable impact on the Star Wars franchise.
While it’s hard to estimate exactly how much this stuff influences viewership numbers, it does actually matter if a show’s internet footprint is dominated by haters. If you get your media criticism from YouTube, it’s easy to passively absorb the belief that The Acolyte is unwatchable trash, a reputation that’s shaped the entire online conversation around this show. By contrast, the people who do love The Acolyte (Reylos; Manny Jacinto aficionados; normal people who liked the look of the trailer) aren’t promoting their views in this kind of orchestrated, SEO-friendly fashion. Some of them are posting renewal hashtags, but mostly, they just enjoyed the show, discussed it on social media, and created fanfic or fanart or TikTok edits.
The gap between these two groups illustrates the conflicted nature of word-of-mouth buzz. Once the Osha/Qimir romantic subplot kicked off, you could see The Acolyte gain popularity among likeminded romance fans. But among casual Star Wars viewers with no connection to that side of fandom, the negative commentary was probably a lot more visible—not just due to the ubiquity of bigoted YouTube criticism, but because the anti-fans were being as noisy and obnoxious as possible. For example, when I briefly tweeted about The Acolyte’s cancellation this week, I had to block dozens of accounts that were clearly just searching for Acolyte fans to harass. They’re actively trying to make the internet as inhospitable as possible for people who enjoy the show.
Bafflingly, there’s very little evidence of Disney trying to curb the toxic side of Star Wars fandom, a community dedicated to sabotaging Disney products and alienating potential customers. Time after time, actors of color have faced ruthless online abuse with minimal protection from the company that put them in the spotlight. It’s all very well to launch projects like The Acolyte and promote them with upbeat press tours, but what matters is the follow-through. And that half of the equation currently involves cancelling the show within weeks of its release, pissing off its fans, and leaving the lead actor to be harassed on Instagram by jeering troglodytes.
Like many streaming-era cancellations, the logistics behind The Acolyte’s demise are somewhat convoluted. Star Wars shows are expensive to make (in this case $180 million for eight episodes), and their profitability relies on various factors including Disney+ engagement and merchandise sales.
In terms of basic viewership stats, The Acolyte started strong with 4.8 million viewers on its first day, the most popular Disney+ premiere this year. But it then tailed off compared to other Star Wars shows, and the finale received significantly lower numbers of “streaming minutes” than shows like The Mandalorian (a huge hit that’s now on its third season) and The Book of Boba Fett (which wasn’t renewed).
On the other hand, The Acolyte was still relatively popular in general, appearing in Nielsen’s top 10 streaming chart throughout much of its run. So it did OK for a Disney+ release, but it did poorly compared to Star Wars shows featuring pre-existing characters. You’ll see a similar trend play out in Disney’s Marvel shows, where Tom Hiddleston’s Loki gets higher ratings than new characters launched via Disney+.
These complicated metrics allow people to use the same numbers to argue that The Acolyte was both a flop and a hit. Either way, the decision-makers at Disney+ decided it wasn’t big enough to continue—a fact that may say more about the current streaming climate than it does about The Acolyte itself. If a show achieves top-10 streaming numbers and attracts a devoted fanbase in a matter of weeks, that seems like a pretty straightforward definition of “popular.” So if that isn’t enough to warrant a second season, the problem is Disney’s own business model.
As many people have pointed out, a show shouldn’t have to achieve massive ratings in its first month in order to survive—particularly when there’s such a clear gap in fan reactions to new and old characters. Obi-Wan Kenobi arrived on Disney+ with 50 years of brand recognition for the titular character, but you can’t expect Osha and Qimir to attract an equal viewership right off the bat. They needed more time to find their audience.
While I can't offer a demographic breakdown of The Acolyte's fanbase, we can make some educated guesses about the audience for a character-based drama with a Black female protagonist, centering on romance, identity issues, and family conflicts. It offers something different from the other Star Wars shows—and we can't ignore the Reylo of it all, either.
Reylo is a fandom juggernaut. Judging by AO3 stats, it’s easily the most popular ship in the entire Star Wars franchise, fuelling a ton of fannish activity during the sequel trilogy and inspiring dozens of romance novels. But before The Acolyte came along, Disney didn't really acknowledge this community. Leslye Headland was the first major Star Wars creator to understand the market for an enemies-to-lovers romance, and her vision resonated not just with Reylo shippers, but with an untapped audience of romance fans. Until, of course, Osha and Qimir's star-crossed love story got cancelled halfway through.
Right now, Disney isn’t just failing to nurture new audiences—it’s cutting them off before they get started.
Over the past few days, I’ve seen a lot of Acolyte fans resort to conspiracy theories during their cancellation grieving process. We’ve got denial: Could it possibly be the case that The Acolyte isn’t cancelled after all? We’ve got bargaining: Maybe a renewal campaign will help! We’ve also got several different flavors of anger and paranoia, including speculation that the show will get pulled from streaming like Willow, and the possibility that Disney has removed The Acolyte’s merch from their online store. (This hasn’t actually happened, BTW. You can still find Acolyte merch at other outlets like Hasbro, and it looks like the main Disney store just sold out.)
But what Disney and Lucasfilm should be most concerned about is the acceptance stage of this grief cycle, and what form it takes among disgruntled Acolyte fans. Some see this cancellation as the nail in the coffin for Star Wars in general, confirming that The Acolyte’s target audience isn’t welcome. Notably that’s also the goal of the YouTube-rant crowd, who have spent years trying to bully women and people of color out of Star Wars fandom.
To use some rather cynical corporate phrasing, it’s increasingly hard to see Star Wars as a trusted brand. The Acolyte’s abrupt cancellation didn’t just frustrate The Acolyte’s fans, it publicly hung the cast and showrunner out to dry, just weeks after they were trotted out on a press tour promoting the show’s diverse casting and now-unfinished romantic arc.
Combine that with broader concerns about the streaming market (why bother watching anything new if it’s going to get cancelled after eight episodes?), and there’s little reason to get invested in new Star Wars offerings. I’m sure this isn’t the message Dave Filoni et al want to send, but through a combination of mismanagement and wilful carelessness about the dark side of fan culture, that’s where we’ve ended up.
This is, of course, an unsustainable situation for the franchise itself. For the past decade or so, Star Wars has—much like Marvel and DC and Star Trek—tried to balance legacy fanservice with diversifying its audience. In an ideal scenario, you create a big tent with different spin-offs aimed at different demographics and interest groups. But if you only have one innovative project like The Acolyte and then you cancel it, you run into obvious problems. You end up emboldening bigots, alienating new fans, and by extension, shrinking your audience.
At present we’re at the peak of a Hollywood trend for regurgitated nostalgia: Deadpool & Wolverine cannibalizing 20 years of Marvel movies; Alien: Romulus and its eerie CGI Ian Holm; Amazon spending half a billion dollars on a glossy ersatz version of Lord of the Rings. Eventually, though, that bubble is going to burst. I predict this moment will arrive for Star Wars in summer 2026, when Disney is optimistically planning to release a feature-length Mandalorian & Grogu film in theaters. While we all love Baby Yoda, that’s not a sign of a healthy franchise brimming with new and exciting ideas. You need projects like The Acolyte to keep the story alive.
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Gavia Baker-Whitelaw is a journalist and critic. Previously a staff writer at the Daily Dot, you can find her work at various outlets including TV Guide, BBC Radio, Inverse, Vulture, and Atlas Obscura. She also co-edits “The Rec Center” with Elizabeth Minkel, and co-hosts the film review podcast Overinvested.