Disney+ has canceled their Star Wars series The Acolyte after just one season.
Deadline is reporting that the streamer has pulled the plug on the series going forward with a second season. The series only debuted on June 4.
The cancellation comes as something of a shock given that just a few weeks earlier, Lucasfilm was promoting the show at San Diego Comic Con last month with a panel for the show and the announcement of a line of tie-in books connecting to the show.
The Acolyte centered on a pair of twin sisters who find themselves the center of machinations that could reverberate across the Star Wars galaxy and change the course of its history. The series was set 100 years before the events of the main Star Wars saga films, in an era known as The High Republic.
The series was a moderate hit with critics, earning a respectable 78% on Rotten Tomatoes. (We gave it a positive review here.) The show’s ratings were not the strongest of any Star Wars series on the streamer, but still respectable. It’s two episode debut generated 4.8 million views on the first day, growing to 11.1 million views globally in its first five days. That was enough to get the premier to the number 7 spot on Nielsen’s Top Ten original series streaming chart for that week. The following week, the series rose to the number six position. However it did drop out of the top ten until the show’s season finale, when it popped back onto the chart at number ten.
The Acolyte was subject to review bombing from a vocal but small minority of toxic fans who seemed to object tho the fact that there were cast and creative crew who were LGBTQ or that the show seemed to violate an obscure piece of lore about a character’s age from the late 1990s, that had been decanonized anyway. If these toxic fans had any effect on Disney’s decision – and it is hard not to draw a parallel between this and the scrambling the studio did with the planning for The Rise Of Skywalker after the same group of toxic fans complained about The Last Jedi – than shame on them. The series may have had some flaws, but it was setting up storylines that promised some interesting exploration of how the Jedi got to the place where their arrogance blinded them to the rising dangers of the Sith as seen in Star Wars: The Phantom Menace.
