Apologies may not be in order, but a slight revision of history definitely is. Less than six months after Disney+’s Star Wars series The Acolyte was canceled, Deadline reports the show’s sole season ended 2024 the second-most streamed series on the platform.
For the fans rallying around the #RenewTheAcolyte hashtag on X (formerly known as Twitter), it’s vindicating reading analytics platform Luminate’s 2024 year-end analysis, which found The Acolyte generated 2.7 billion minutes of viewing time in six months. This news comes months after the show’s cancellation was attributed to low viewership. At the time, reports surfaced about the series falling out of Nielsen’s Top 10 originals chart for the majority of its episodes. Canceling a series a month after its finale, even though showrunner and creator Leslye Headland pitched it as a multi-season endeavor, seems incredibly short-sighted, especially when you factor in the fact that the viewership of the first two episodes more than doubled four days after they premiered.
The only original series to have been watched for longer on Disney+ was Percy Jackson and the Olympians, which attracted over 3 billion minutes of viewing time and was renewed for a second season a week after its Season 1 finale. Percy Jackson debuted in December 2023, meaning it took the series twice as long as The Acolyte to attract less than 50% more viewership minutes. Even by Disney’s stated logic, it would appear The Acolyte deserved a second season.
However, the biggest difference between Percy Jackson and The Acolyte is the former wasn’t as polarizing as the latter. The Acolyte’s central star, Amandla Stenberg, says she was inundated with such a “rampage of vitriol” that she was not surprised by its cancellation. It may be unknown what percentage of the show’s 2024 streaming numbers were people hate watching it to find ways to pick it apart, but there’s no question that The Acolyte was a hit for the streaming service.
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