What’s confusing about this entire situation is that Disney and Lucasfilm apparently had plans for The Acolyte’s future. Just last month at San Diego Comic Con, Lucasfilm Publishing announced spinoff books and comics related to The Acolyte, mainly focusing on the characters that died in the series. But the four main characters that are still alive – twins Osha and Mae, Qimir and Vernestra – are stuck on the shelf. So what does this mean exactly? Did Disney believe the deceased Yord and Jecki were far more worthy of investment? On the surface, that would be an easy guess. But the real problem lies with Disney and Lucasfilm succumbing to the pressure that the poisonous side of the Star Wars fandom laid on them.
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Story-wise, it wasn’t going to be for everyone, but it was definitely for a lot of people. The amount of positive reviews by critics and Manny Jacinto acquiring new fans proved as such. But as more shows led by women, LGBTQ+ creatives and POC get canceled, it sends a signal to other networks or services that people aren’t interested in their stories. It limits the amount of diversity allowed in the entertainment industry. It also permits the obscene animosity that’s fragmented the Star Wars fandom. If Star Wars wants to continue to be a dominating franchise in this industry, it has to learn to take chances and stick with them. Otherwise, the world will move on while it’s stuck in the past.
This sends a good message. Spectacle is no longer a draw, look at marvel. Hire some writers and you’ll have a hit, waste your budget on spectacle and get cancelled/not renewed.
What a bullshit article.
I really want to down vote the article, but even stupid, incomplete, half-assed articles should be seen for the discussion they can bring.
As long as OP doesn’t get pissy for being wrong, we can have a discord.
As long as OP doesn’t get pissy for being wrong, we can have a discord.
That’s a funny sentence considering discord means a lack of agreement and active quarreling.
Weaponized brain rot this article.
There are lots of series with mentioned groups of people that scores great with audience right now. House of the dragon has lots of superficial diversity, and it gets a good rep because its simply written better.
Calling your audience homophobic, racist or what ever because they dont like your poorly written show wont help you cause.
Nepo-babies in the industry has to go. No talent with all the right connections.
The show is just bad. Period. All the talk about Women, LGBT+ and POC is meaningless when the show falls flat on it’s face.
I thoroughly enjoyed it. And so did many reviewers. It was no Andor but it was great fun and an interesting plot.
And I’m glad you did. I watched the entire show even though it wasn’t of my taste. Also, agreed… Andor was freaking amazing.
The anti woke crowd bitches about everything, and don’t have enough buying power to cancel anything.
If a show is unpopular, it has nothing to do with how “woke” it is.
Not to get conspiratorial but I genuinely think that media outlets are pushing this narrative to pretend that money doesn’t dictate everything. Having Star Wars fans fight each other draws attention away from the money focused behavior of every single large corporation.
Disney doesn’t care about the reception itself, only the financial implications and brand damage (which has poor financial implications). Online complainers and review bombers have almost no power whatsoever: I don’t remember seeing anything about that when it was happening, and it did not do significant damage. Online complaints/review bombing happens every month and can actually be helpful, e.g. Velma season 2.
The show blew $180mil— larger than the budget of Top Gun: Maverick— and had significantly lower viewership than all of the other SW D+ shows. Season 2 was guaranteed to do worse. That’s all that matters. Good movies and shows, well liked by critics and audience alike, have underperformed and had their sequels cancelled. Furiosa just happened and lost nowhere near the money that this one did. It’s just capitalism.
And yet I’ve seen more articles about this show now than I ever did when it came out, claiming nonsense about a creative risk adverse Lucasfilm and overstating the power of anti-woke lunatics that complain loudly while accomplishing very little. This shifts blame from executives who wrote a check for this show to spend a shocking near-$700k per minute of runtime. Shifts it right to other viewers— other regular people— with a different opinion on the show, now fighting one another about whether they were too critical. All while tricking people into thinking that racist or sexist whiners have more power than they really do.
I don’t even blame Disney for cancelling it, I would have too. Just think it’s odd that the conversation is dominated by audience feeling and not audience funding.
Also, for another fun stat, I searched up Acolyte’s budget and found this:
You could produce the entirety of both Clone Wars (133 episodes) and Rebels (74 episodes) and still have 15 million dollars left over, or you could pay for 7 episodes of Acolyte
This same blasé approach to budgets is exactly what got Disney into the box office mess last year during their 100th anniversary. Flop after flop after flop that could have been avoided with restrained budgets. It was executive failure from start to finish, and yet they’ve mostly avoided consequences by shifting the blame. Thousands of regular employees were fired but most of the executives were fine.
I will get hate despite being LGBTQ myself, but if 20% of the viewers are LGBTQ, why must the representation be 50/50 or more in their favor? I think we’ve gone a bit overboard to the opposite. Even trying to watch kids tv shows with my toddler, I’ve noticed not a single white kid anymore in main casts, and wonder what it means for white children, as they’re being raised to be seen as the enemy.
Not only that but the attempts by Disney, Kathleen Kennedy and similar people to be more inclusive, PC and diverse, are so ham fisted and half assed, that they only come off as corporate bullshit. A funny example is that Bobba Fett no longer has the starship Slave1. He now rides “Bobba Fetts starship” cause slaves can’t be used cause it’s not PC. Yet Anakin was a slave, and even Disney’s episode 8 had a subplot about slaves.
They will make a new series focusing on Darth Plagueis (sp?) that will follow The Acolyte. Nothing ever dies anymore.
I watched the first two episodes when they dropped and was like “Ok, this has promise, lets see where this goes…”
Then the third episode dropped and made me sad I wasted the time watching the first two…
So Mae set a fire and killed everyone and blames the Jedi because she’s just a little bitch? Yeah, I’m out. Bad writing, bad acting. If you can’t adequately explain your characters motivations, why are you even bothering?
Now, granted, the story probably evolved and changed after Ep. 3. Maybe Mae had her perceptions twisted by the dark side, etc. etc.
But you know what? They made it so I stopped caring 3 episodes in to an 8 episode run.
That’s not racism, that’s not “anti-woke”, that’s an honest reaction to a bad show.
The fire didn’t kill anyone. Mae had other (bad) reasons to blame the Jedi for.
Then that’s the fault of whoever wrote and directed episode 3.
No, it was part of the narrative. Not everything has to be simple or immediately explained.
Not in episode 3 it wasn’t. And yeah, it does need to be explained if you don’t want people going “Well that was fucking stupid…”
That says more about audiences than anything else. I don’t want handholding, I want twists.
Just gotta say, that stone structure was incredibly flammable…
Yeah that was quite unrealistic! Definitely a touch silly, but then again this IS Star Wars.
What’s the bad message? That if you make a boring show with shit writing people might not like it and it will get canceled? Ooooh noooo! You mean studios might actually have to give a shit about the projects they pump out and can’t simply rely on slapping a beloved IP with rainbow colored paint on top of a pile of manure and calling it a day? What a horrible message to send.
This should not be confusing. The issue is while it did receive good critical reviews it did not hit the viewer numbers that it needed to be financially successful. The problem here is simple. There are a boatload in of SW fans but this show was not made for 95% of fans it was made for a very small demographic a portion of which are not StarWars fans. The show was not successful monetarily as a result and was cancelled as a result. The group it was catering to is either 1 of 2 things if not both. 1 not large enough to provide the viewer numbers for the show 2 not watching the show cause they weren’t fans of the source material. This is not a dangerous precedent this happens all the time. Take a show I loved Pushing up Daisy’s. It was fantastic critics loved it but the audience for it was not large enough to provide the viewership necessary to keep it on the air. The truth is this isn’t political or social it’s simply monetary. Disney has had a string of flops and they can’t afford to hemorrhage any more money.
Pushing Daisies mostly got canceled due to the writer’s strike, IIRC.
It was a factor but ultimately it came down to poor viewership and the vfx costs were higher than advertising revenue
I’d add that the writing and characters were kinda poop. Barely any of them had any consistency, or real redeemable qualities, and if any did they were killed off. I cringed really hard on episode 3, and just kinda gave up on it.
I loved everything about Pushing Daisies. I looked forward to it each week. Great writing. Great stories. Wonderful characters. That narrators comforting voice. Everything about it was somehow heart warming and macabre at the same time. Im not a big fan of musicals, but the musical scenes in those few episodes worked. Probably because Kristin Chenoweth is a national treasure. Perhaps if more people knew about it, then it would never have been canceled.
Jecki at least got the heroic death - the reveal, but Yord was just fridged. Still fuming about their abrupt end.
