The Acolyte has been canceled and will not be getting another terrible and terribly expensive season. As someone who watched the entire first season, I can tell you that outcome is well deserved.

The story of The Acolyte will not continue, with Lucasfilm opting not to proceed with a second season of the Star Wars offshoot starring Amandla Stenberg, sources tell Deadline.

Word of the decision comes more than a month after the eight-episode first season of the series from creator, director, executive producer and showrunner Leslye Headland wrapped its run on Disney+.

The Acolyte became the latest battle over a high-profile project, attracting some fans and also a lot of critics, some of whom characterized the whole show as woke. But ultimately, as much as the fans of the show would love to blame this on a few high-profile voices (Critical Drinker, Nerdrotic, Star Wars Theory), the real problem was the ratings. Not enough people watched to justify the $180 million budget.

Driven by interest into the venerable space franchise, The Acolyte got off to a strong start when it launched June 4 with two episodes, generating 4.8M views in its first day on the streamer to rank as the biggest series premiere on Disney+ this year...

But The Acolyte could not sustain the momentum, dropping out of the Top 10 in Week 3 and staying off before returning at No. 10 after the release of the finale (335M minutes, believed to be the lowest for a Star Wars series finale).

My own take is that the show genuinely was a woke mess. That is to say it's problems weren't just generic story-telling problems, they were moral problems tied to the specific outlook of the show's creator.

At base, the story ideas behind the Acolyte were ones that would naturally occur to a leftist creating this show post-2020. Simply put, the Jedi are space cops and because all cops are now suspect and probably evil, this is a show in which the space cops are cruel, arrogant and part of a cover-up of a mass murder. The past comes back to haunt them and they all die for their crimes.

In fact, the conclusion of the show is that the good sister who seemed somewhat likeable at first, becomes enraged by what she learns and murders the last Jedi involved in killing her mother and a bunch of other space witches. She then agrees to become an Acolyte for a murderous Sith who has killed a slew of Jedi throughout the show, most of whom had no connection to the events of the past. His moral framework is that he should be free to kill because he can. But rather than presenting him as a villain, in this show he's presented as a sexy anti-hero.

The message of this show as structured, is that the awful behavior of the space police (the Jedi) should radicalize us all, maybe to the point of violence and revenge. Again, you can see how this might have seemed like a good idea to a certain group of Hollywood creatives in late 2020 or thereabouts. But in 2024 it just seems unhinged and completely at odds with everything Star Wars has been about up to now.

Disney seems to have belatedly realized this was a train wreck and there was a report this week that merchandise connected to the show has disappeared.

Now there is panic spreading that Disney may take things a step further and delete the entire series from the service, trying to take some sort of tax write-off in the process, as we’ve seen in the past across the streaming industry...

This appears to have started with fans saying that Disney has deleted all official Acolyte merchandise from its store, as it’s not a sub-category, and it returns no search results...

Disney can delete the show to avoid paying residuals for the series, and there is already precedent for this within Disney Plus itself. This exact same thing happened to Willow, a show that was little-watched and Disney simply nuked it. There is now no legal way to watch the Willow show...

According to the LA Times, Disney's contract said it had to pay residuals on Willow based on the number of subscribers to Disney+, not on how many of them were watching Willow. And since Willow was a flop, they were likely paying more than it was worth. Could the same happen with the Acolyte? I guess that would depend on the specifics of the contract. But Forbes reports this would be a big PR hit if they did because fans of the show already believe they caved to the critics by canceling it. I guess we'll see.

Here's the Critical Drinker's take on why this got canceled.