It’s been almost two years since Disney and Lucasfilm canceled The Acolyte, and pretty much everything we’ve heard about the show since has seemed to refute the backlash—with Disney citing cost concerns rather than issues of quality, to the show itself ending up being Disney+’s second biggest show of 2024. Now, even with plenty more new Star Wars to watch since, it looks like the show’s still proving there was a demand for its ideas beneath the noise.
This week Flix Patrol reported that The Acolyte returned to the top 10 streamed shows on Disney+ in the United States this week. On the one hand, it’s not too surprising—more new Star Wars typically leads to people watching old Star Wars as well, and the current number one show on the list is Maul: Shadow Lord. Given the two shows’ parallels of examining the dark side, there’s certainly some crossover audience there, but it’s still interesting that it was Acolyte that pulled ahead more so than any other Star Wars show if Maul was the proverbial rising tide.
Maybe the show is helped by being so far removed from the elevated controversy over it—the grifters who declared it the worst thing in the world have moved on to other cycles and suddenly no longer fervently care about the age of Ki-Adi-Mundi, that’s for certain. Maybe, really, part of the fact that it’s a one-and-done thing people can check out as a “complete” story makes it easier to jump into.
But without the noise that dogged Acolyte throughout its broadcast—noise Disney rarely, if ever, did much to try and abate—maybe people can just start seeing The Acolyte for what it was: a messy show with interesting ideas that deserved time to forge those ideas into something even bigger. Alas, we’ll have to make do with people seeing what it was all about in hindsight.
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