Lucasfilm Decides Against Renewing The Acolyte
Lucasfilm has decided not to renew The Acolyte for a second season despite its initial success.
According to sources close to the production, Lucasfilm has decided not to proceed with the second season of Amandla Stenberg’s Star Wars series, The Acolyte. Despite its mixed reception among fans and critics, the show aired its first season of eight episodes on Disney+ and has remained up in the air since the end of the season.
The Acolyte was produced, created, and mostly helmed by Lesley Headland, presenting a weird, uneven version of our favorite universe. Fans could witness another excellently choreographed swordfight followed by some action scenes which were considerably weaker and acted far worse than the cast’s previous performances. Lucasfilm invested quite a significant sum of money into making the show premiered with 4.8m U.S. views on its first day and eventually reached 11.1m views worldwide within 5 days. That being said, the season’s low point was the season finale, noted as the least watched Star Wars finale on Disney+. In terms of its Nielsen ratings, it finally got onto the main top 10 at no. 10 in its finale’s week. Certainly, the show’s cost of around $200 million also had its say.
On August 29 this year, the situation around The Acolyte was still unclear and remains such. If Disney+ had made an official statement about it, it could have been done during the D23 Expo. Still, no such statement has been made. As for the show’s reception, it has 78% on Rotten Tomatoes, indicating that the show was good objectively but failed to capture a broader audience for long due to its unevenness. Thus, a decision not to renew The Acolyte for the second season was quite predictable. After all, the anthology format star wars shows plainly do not work well. On the other hand, the fact that a brilliant actor like Manny Jacinto had big shoes to feature a Star Wars series might not go in vain in the future. Furthermore, the new series Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania and The Good Place star can certainly show his best display in the upcoming episodes. Though there is little information available about this series, Lucasfilm has disclosed that the series will stick to the tradition and premiere in late 2023.
