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Despite receiving positive critical reception and attracting a passionate fan base, Leslye Headland’s Star Wars series The Acolyte was canceled after one season in August, following an intense online review-bombing campaign run by some of the galaxy’s loudest trolls. But in a new interview, a Disney executive said that canceling the show came down to one key component: money.
During a recent interview with Vulture, co-chairman of Disney Entertainment Alan Bergman said that although the company was happy with how The Acolyte fared on Disney+, it wasn’t enough of a success to justify a second season considering how much the show cost.
“We were happy with our performance, but it wasn’t where we needed it to be given the cost structure of that title, quite frankly, to go and make a season two,” Bergman said. “So that’s the reason why we didn’t do that.”
In September, Forbes reported that The Acolyte ultimately cost $230.1 million to make based on Disney’s production filings. In comparison, the entire budget for the currently airing show Star Wars: Skeleton Crew costs $136 million, per The Hollywood Reporter, and a season of Star Wars’ flagship live-action show The Mandalorian costs around $120 million, per IGN. However, the Rogue One prequel series Andor has cost the most to produce so far, with Forbes reporting that the show’s two seasons cost $645 million in total.
Although The Acolyte’s budget played a role in its cancelation, a subset of toxic fans’ viral anger toward one of the only live-action Star Wars shows that prominently featured queer people, people of color, and women shouldn’t be discounted as a factor in Disney’s final decision, either. At the time of writing, The Acolyte holds a 78% critical score and an 18% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes. According to a June Forbes report, the show received over 25,000 total user scores combined in just three weeks, which is more than all three seasons of The Mandalorian combined.
Shortly after The Acolyte’s cancellation, series star Amandla Stenberg took to Instagram Stories on August 28, saying that she was unsurprised about the news following the online backlash that the show received.
“It’s not a huge shock for me,” Stenberg said. “There has been a rampage of vitriol that we have faced since the show was even announced… We started experiencing a rampage of, I would say, hyper-conservative bigotry and vitriol, prejudice, hatred, and hateful language towards us.”
Since Disney canceled The Acolyte, the House of Mouse has faced pushback for removing multiple trans storylines from its projects following the 2024 U.S. presidential election. Last month, news broke that Disney reportedly pulled an episode of its animated series Moon Girl and the Devil Dinosaur because it followed a trans athlete voiced by Indya Moore. Last week, the company confirmed that a storyline featuring a trans character from its forthcoming animated series Win or Lose was cut due to concerns that “many parents would prefer to discuss certain subjects with their children on their own terms and timeline.”
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