I’m not a fan of The Acolyte.
I tried watching it and after the first two episodes, I was out. It wasn’t that it was woke—it really wasn’t all that woke at that point. No, it committed the cardinal sin of being boring.
Really boring.
And considering that we had a murder mystery, fights, and Jedi galore, being boring was almost impressive.
So, I didn’t watch anymore. I decided that I’d do my part not to support the project, especially when the actors and executives did what they always do: Blame the fans for not liking what was being served.
And how did that work out for them? Did The Acolyte folks shame the fans into supporting a product because they didn’t want to be haters?
LOL no.
Disney is chock-full of disasters, but it has no one to blame but itself. The company has soaked itself in so much wokeness and DEI nonsense that if it does produce anything halfway decent, it did it on accident.
But nothing has quite embarrassed it like its recent product from Lucasfilm, the newest atrocity toward the Star Wars brand, "The Acolyte," a show made by former Harvey Weinstein right-hand gal, Leslye Headland. Now, according to the latest numbers, it's even worse than many thought.
According to Cosmic Book News, the latest Nielsen ratings are in, and "The Acolyte" is one of the worst-performing shows in the Star Wars lineup, coming in at 75 percent fewer watched minutes than all of the Disney/Star Wars shows except one:
We already knew the viewership was lower than Ahsoka, but it’s also been learned the viewership is much lower than The Mandalorian by what looks to be nearly 75%, it’s lower than Obi-Wan Kenobi, and it’s even lower than The Book of Boba Fett.
The Acolyte only beats Andor in terms of viewership, and really not by much.
The Acolyte also cost nearly double that of Ahsoka—$187M vs $100M—while the Nielsen ratings reveal that Ahsoka‘s viewership is nearly double that of The Acolyte.
Disney and Bob Iger definitely can’t be happy with these numbers.
Embarrassing doesn't begin to cover it. The show has been inundated with negative reviews and has generated so much spite from the Star Wars fan base due to lazy writing, political allegories, world-breaking story elements, and lesbian space witches who conceive children immaculately with the "power of many."
I mean, they managed to make lesbian space witches annoying to the 15-50-year-old male demographic, which is kind of impressive, if you think about it.
Also, as noted in the original piece, as of that writing, The Acolyte had a 14% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes. For what it’s worth, that’s still holding strong.
Andor, by contrast, has an audience score of 86%. It may not have had massive viewership, but the people who watched liked it.
Then again, no one got attacked for not tripping over themselves to see Andor, now did they? Of course not.
Now, I’m not a fan of Andor. I tried watching it but couldn’t get into it because ultimately, I know what happens to the character. It wasn’t compelling for me. Yet a lot of people thoroughly enjoyed it. More power to them.
Ahsoka, which is also mentioned, has an audience score of 64%, which seems about right. I enjoyed it, but it wasn’t as good as The Mandalorian, which is one of my favorite programs of any kind of all time.
See, the truth of the matter is that despite protestations to the contrary, people just don’t like The Acolyte.
At a normal entertainment company, this would be taken as a sign that someone made a bad decision somewhere along the way. They might look at why that decision was made or they might just decide to shrug it off and move forward.
But Disney has done its best to try and guilt people into liking the Acolyte. The lead actor even wrote a diss track for those who didn’t like the show. How is that productive?
It should be noted, however, that while they want to pretend that people are just bigoted about the inclusion of a female lead character or a black actor in that role, let’s remember that Ashoka had both of those and nobody cared. Even if some didn’t like the show in and of itself—and it did have problems, so while I liked it, I get why some might not have—people loved Rosario Dawson in that role.
What is going to doom Disney, particularly with Lucasfilm as a division, is this insistence on chalking up all criticism to some form of bigotry. The objective truth is that there’s no evidence to suggest it.
But that history has soured me on Star Wars, and I’ve been a fan of the franchise since 1977. I was there, in the theater, too young to read the scroll but enthralled just the same.
I’d say The Acolyte did it, but it was just a bad Star Wars product. I’d have weathered that just fine.
No, this idea that the fans are wrong for not taking what we’re spoonfed is what killed it for me.
And, it looks like there’s at least a decent chance that it killed it for a lot of other people, based on these results.
Despite a lot of hype, a lot of media attention, and a ton of money thrown at something that a lot of people were stoked about, including myself, The Acolyte is an absolutely ‘lyte-weight of a show. (Again, I regret nothing. NOTHING!)
Kathleen Kennedy should be removed from her job immediately, at least if Disney wants Lucasfilm to stop churning out crap. Unfortunately, I don’t think anyone at the mouse house has the intelligence to see that her nonsense is hurting them. Probably because they suffer from the same mind virus she does called DEI.
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