There was a disturbance on the Force last week when it was confirmed that the latest entry in the Star Wars franchise, The Acolyte, would not get a second season on Disney+. There had already been a very public effort to promote a renewal of the series, and the fact that this didn’t happen hasn’t dissuaded those fans in the slightest.
At the same time, it’s hard to overlook the fact that for every voice that argued in favor of more Acolyte, there was another that really didn’t seem to like the show. The reasons for the backlash against the show aren’t necessarily from the most open-minded of fans, but that doesn’t change the fact that there were a lot of people who are just as happy more of The Acolyte isn’t coming.
How Fans Of The Acolyte Are Trying To Save The Show
It’s fairly common in cases like The Acolyte for petitions to be created trying to get studios to see just how popular a recently canceled show is. To be fair, a lot of the time such a petition ends up doing the opposite, as they frequently fail to get the sort of significant support that might get noticed. But that has not been the case for The Acolyte.
As of this writing the petition calling to renew The Acolyte is approaching 50,000 signatories, which is quite a lot for petitions of this kind. Certainly, not every person who enjoyed the show is signing such a petition, it takes a certain type of dedicated fan to find and sign a petition, but this shows that there are quite a lot of dedicated fans who don’t just like the show but are willing to fight for it.
These people are clearly a representative sample of those who would watch Season 2 of The Acolyte, were such a thing to happen. However, the question of just how many people there are is more difficult to figure out.
The Acolyte Clearly Struggled To Find An Audience
While Disney+, like most streaming platforms, doesn’t release a lot of its data regarding viewership, the estimates that are out there do indicate that The Acolyte didn’t get to see the sort of numbers that resulted in the last Disney+ streaming Star Wars show, Ahsoka getting the greenlight for Season 2. Reports have also indicated Acolyte was a particularly expensive show to produce, so when those two things are put together, it’s not hard to see why Season 2 became a long shot.
It should be said that not all of the negative responses to the show seemed genuine. The Acolyte appeared to suffer from review bombing from people who decided they didn't like what it was before the show ever aired. For everybody who loved The Acolyte, because it was something different from Star Wars, some disliked the show for the same reason.
At the end of the day, the reason people didn’t watch is less important than the fact that they didn’t. If people didn’t watch, or even simply didn’t finish Season 1, they are less likely to watch Season 2 if it happened.
With the cancellation of The Acolyte already being official, it’s unlikely that any petition will change things, but who knows? The Acolyte ending certainly gave us a tease that could still be explored in an upcoming Star Wars movie or series, that could still include the same characters, even if it was technically called something else.
