New Star Wars show The Acolyte has been canceled at Disney+

It's a sad day for fans of The Acolyte, the latest Star Wars series to debut on Disney+. Deadline reports that the streamer and Lucasfilm have decided not to move forward with a second season of the series. That's a pretty quick cancelation decision considering that The Acolyte only aired its finale just over a month ago. It's not wholly unexpected, considering the divisive reaction the series garnered, along with its diminishing viewership numbers.

According to Deadline, The Acolyte's two-episode debut brought in around 4.8 million views on its release day, which was the largest series debut of the year on Disney+. That number rose to over 11.1 million views after five days, and continued to hold strong enough to put the show onto the Nielsen Top 10 for the first two weeks of its release, at Number 7 and Number 6, respectively. According to Nielsen, the show was watched for around 488 million minutes viewed during that first week, which was more than enough to put it on the chart.

However, The Acolyte then dropped off the chart in its third week, and didn't break back into the Top 10 until the week of its finale, when it clocked in at Number 10. Nielson's numbers say the finale was only watched for around 335 million minutes, which is apparently the lowest finale for any Star Wars series that has yet aired on Disney+. (Yes, it's confusing that here we're talking about minutes, and above we talked about "views." It can be hard to parse numbers from streamers who keep a tight fist on their viewership data.)

All that aside, the general thrust seems to be that people were curious about The Acolyte at the start, but a lot of them didn't stick through to the end. That's a shame in my opinion — The Acolyte got stronger as it went on, with Episodes 5-8 in particular having some great stuff. I wasn't a hardcore fan of the show and thought it had plenty of rough spots, but it was more original than a lot of the Disney+ Star Wars fare and clearly had a lot more gas in the tank by the time the credits rolled on the finale. I think The Acolyte probably would have only gotten better given the opportunity to find steadier footing in a second season.

Led by showrunner Leslye Headland, The Acolyte was set many years before even the Star Wars prequel trilogy and followed a former Jedi Padawan named Osha (Amandla Stenberg) as she reunites with her master Sol (Lee Jung-jae) to investigate a string of mysterious murders. They end up pitted against Osha's twin sister Mae (also played by Stenberg) and a shadowy Sith named Qimir (Manny Jacinto). By the end of the season, those character pairings were completely different, which set the stage for an intriguing next chapter.

Hopefully, we find out what that next chapter might have been at some point, maybe in some other form. The Acolyte did find a passionate following, especially thanks to its fleshed out enemies-to-lovers storyline — a rarity in Star Wars. Unfortunately, it also garnered a huge amount of pushback from the expected toxic corners of the Star Wars fandom; there were "fans" who hated the existence of the show so much that they review-bombed a totally different movie with a similar title on accident. The Acolyte was not a perfect show, but it by no means deserved the amount of hatred that was directed at it. We can only hope that wasn't a factor in Disney and Lucasfilm's decision, and it was the subpar numbers, as Deadline suggests.

Of course, the numbers do bring to mind another issue: in our current streaming age, shows either need to be runaway breakout successes or they risk getting the axe. It's wild that a show like The Acolyte, which still holds the title as the highest series debut for a Disney+ original this year, could get jettisoned so quickly. Deadline notes that the threshold for renewing these sorts of high-budget original series is extremely high at Disney. And alas, The Acolyte just didn't pull the numbers to justify a renewal.

Thus far, neither Lucasfilm, Headland, nor the show's cast has made any public comment on the cancelation. While we wait to hear from them, you can still stream all eight episodes of The Acolyte on Disney+.

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