As you know, I look at how each Disney+ Star Wars series performs on the streaming charts. In early 2024, I also added Luminate to the picture and looked at their charts. I’ve discussed Skeleton Crew’s Luminate charts before because their charts are released more timely. Nielsen has a 4-week delay, and Luminate typically releases charts around 24 hours after the one-week data collection period ends (however, Luminate hasn’t updated charts since mid-December).
So what does the Nielsen streaming chart say? After never cracking the top 10 of Luminate’s streaming charts, is Skeleton Crew doing better here? Click to see details!
No love for Neil
Well…Skeleton Crew didn’t make the top ten, as was the case with the Luminate rankings. Luminate and Nielsen agree. The show ranked 10th on the Nielsen original series rankings, with 384 million minutes watched.
This is the first time a live-action “Star Wars” series has failed to crack the top 10 of Nielsen’s original series rankings with its first episode. This is a major disappointment for Lucasfilm and should be very concerning to them. Is it possible that Acolyte and other generally bland shows (Ahsoka, The Mandalorian Season 3, Obi-Wan Kenobi) will turn people away from Disney+? Star Wars content?
I don’t believe “Skeleton Crew” will ever reach the top ten of the charts even once. For a show worth over $130 million, the ratings must be woefully low. It also goes to show that Disney isn’t even trying to turn this into a success story, as they’re still trying for Acolyte by releasing their own numbers with a global scope. In fact, we haven’t heard anything from them. Those numbers must be so bad that no PR campaign in the world can make it look like a success story.
If I were Lucasfilm, I’d be worried that The Mandalorian and Grogu movie might actually underperform. They really need to do a good job marketing this time around, and Jon Favreau has to recapture the magic of the first two seasons. Otherwise Star Wars could be in real trouble.
The fact is that a show that received mostly positive reviews from viewers failed to gain any traction. This is particularly concerning because typically you would expect word of mouth to have a positive impact.
Additionally, “Skeleton Crew” has a much better chance of breaking into the top 10 on Nielsen’s charts because Nielsen’s data collection window is more conducive to shows in the first week. So Skeleton Crew has just over two days to accumulate viewing time. Nielsen, however, collects data from Monday through Sunday, so “Skeleton Crew” had more than five days to accrue viewing time in its first week.
I believe it’s time for Disney to clean house at Lucasfilm. Regardless of the quality of the show, all budgets were out of control. Not just the TV show, but the movie, the movie produced by Lucasfilm (“Indy 5”). Lucasfilm spent nearly $1 billion (after tax credits) on Andor, Acolyte, and Skeletor, which is crazy.
I also believe that the era of the Disney+ Star Wars series may be coming to an end. Star Wars requires a certain production quality, you can’t make a lengthy plot for Star Wars with people sitting around a table talking, you need action, CGI, planets, sets…and that’s never going to be cheap. They clearly haven’t found a way to make a Star Wars streaming show on a reasonable budget. Obi-Wan Kenobi had a reported budget of $90 million, which was close to that, but the show also looked incredibly cheap and at times like a fan-made production.
What’s more, it’s likely that people will stop liking Star Wars after experiencing so many disappointments. That’s reflected in merchandise sales, which we know are at an all-time low even now.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again…if Disney doesn’t want Star Wars to die with a whimper, they need to clean house, replace Kennedy, hire all new creative talent, and give the franchise a proper plan and continuity vision. Since the show now jumps around in timelines with really no common thread, everything feels very scattered and almost random.
Ultimately, Star Wars may not be suitable for the small screen. Unlike Star Wars, which wasn’t made for the big screen, the Star Wars movies never really took off because everything people loved about Star Wars was best realized on TV/streaming. Everything people love about Star Wars may not be made for TV/streaming on a reasonable budget. Unless it’s animated like Clone Wars. But live-action Star Wars has a lot of expectations that you have to meet.
I wouldn’t be surprised if Ahsoka Season 2 is the last live-action Star Wars series on Disney+. The perception Disney is getting for these shows (with the exception of The Mandalorian , which is trying to become a movie series) doesn’t justify the huge production costs. It’s that simple.
what else. Disney+ continues to severely underperform on the streaming charts. No original series made the top ten. The only movie on the list is the classic Home Alone, a Christmas classic that always appears on the December charts. Another Christmas movie, Elf , is in the top 10 of Hulu/Max movies, so it’s not even exclusive to Hulu. On paper, Disney+ might be the second largest streaming service behind Netflix…but they have no flagship content, no Stranger Things, no Squidward, no One Piece, no The Mandalorian… It became famous, but no other show was able to recapture it. Instead, what we saw were diminishing returns, with ratings dropping show after show, to the point where Ahsoka’s season finale had fewer viewers than Andor’s season finale . Then The Acolyte floundered…and now Skeleton Crew, despite being one of the best things Lucasfilm has ever produced under the Disney umbrella, is a complete dud in terms of ratings.
When even critically acclaimed shows no longer find an audience…it’s time to take action. Lucasfilm needs to change. Better earlier than later.
Nielsen Streaming Chart
