Well, this situation escalated pretty quickly… While The Acolyte remained in the top 10 of Luminate’s Original Series charts until Episodes 4 and 5, it didn’t drop out until Episode 6 was released in Week 5, “The Acolyte” has fallen out of the top 10 of Nielsen’s original series rankings in its fourth episode in its third week! The show ranked tenth on the Nielsen rankings with 298 million minutes. The number of acolytes must be less than this. According to Luminate, The Acolyte clocked in at 262 million minutes in Week 3 (Episode 4). Click to view brief review.
The acolyte is as dead as the wookiee
Nielsen’s No. 1 show is of course Bridgerton, with 2.465 billion minutes, about 10 times as many as The Acolyte. Please keep this in mind. Disney+ about 45 million. If we take into account the larger subscriber base, in relative terms, Bridgerton still has 5.5x the number of minutes watched compared to the subscriber base.
Even those on X who fancied a second season have now been brought back to the real world. The Acolyte was a huge failure for Disney. It’s the least-watched Star Wars series of all time…with even lower ratings than Andor.
Andor had its worst showing with 356 million minutes in Week 3 (Episode 5), which was even the lowest of the season, with the middle portion of the Aldani heist arc airing that week. If we use Luminate’s data and assume everyone only watched that week’s new episodes, we get the following results:
Andorra: 356 million minutes – 8.28 million views
The Acolyte: 262 million minutes – 8.18 million views
It’s close, but worse than Andorra, which had low ratings to begin with. Andor also surpassed The Acolyte in viewership the week before. The following week, Luminate reported that The Acolyte had played just 232.4 million minutes, or even less. The show continues to lose viewers.
If we use Luminate and Nielsen’s week 4 data, the result would look like this:
Andor (Nielsen): 405 million minutes – 8.1 million views
The Acolyte (Luminate): 232.4 million minutes – 7.26 million views
In short: The Acolyte dropped nearly 1 million views in Week 4, trailing Andor by nearly 1 million views. And the gap is only going to get bigger, as Andor has maintained an average of 8-9 million viewers and never really lost viewers, in fact the season finale will even see growth (it did even better than Ahsoka OK! So maybe not even 200 million minutes.
Star Wars isn’t even popular enough right now to crack the Nielsen original series top ten, or the top ten overall, which is embarrassing. Andor fell off the charts for a while, but has since bounced back (approximately 400 million minutes played that week). Acolyte may never make the rankings again. Just a reminder: Lucasfilm spent over $180 million on marketing for this. So probably over 200 million.
To make matters worse, “House of the Dragon” is also released on cable, so it’s not even exclusive to streaming, clocking in at 1.226 billion minutes on Nielsen’s streaming acquisitions rankings. Let this sink in too. “House of the Dragon” costs about the same as “The Acolyte” but takes 5.3 times as long to watch. Even if we take into account the longer episode, 58 minutes, “House of the Dragon” has been viewed 21.14 million times in the United States. Compare that to The Acolyte’s 7.26. “House of the Dragon” also has a female producer and several leading ladies, one of whom is also LGBT, like Amandla Stenberg… And “House of the Dragon” not only Didn’t get bombarded with reviews and was a hit. There’s a lot of overlap between fan bases though.
Star Wars isn’t even in the same league as other genre shows anymore, Star Wars is minor league, not even minor league.
But that’s what happens when you hire a Star Wars show that hates the Jedi and wants to portray them in the worst light possible, rather than wanting people to sympathize with psychopathic murderers.
Why does Katherine Kennedy still have a job? She’s also about to bury Star Wars now. Under her leadership, Star Wars transitioned from the major leagues to the minor leagues. After the brief high that The Mandalorian gave us, it just went downhill. But the downward trend might not be over yet, and maybe Star Wars will just hit rock bottom with a Rey movie. If Iger had any sense left, he would veto the project before it went into production. Now it’s revealed that filming will not take place until 2024. How about “never” instead?
Additionally, as sad as it is, the Skrull crew will likely pay a price, just as Solo was also affected by The Last Jedi. Skeleton Crew could be a complete flop, with even lower numbers than The Acolyte. Once you’ve lost your audience’s trust, it’s hard to regain it. But Lucasfilm’s The Mandalorian was on the right track…and yet Kennedy derailed the train. We are here now. “Star Wars” isn’t even close to cracking the top 10 original series streaming charts. A service with more than 45 million subscribers in the United States doesn’t have any original programming on the charts. Netflix has seven. An unfinished book series and a spin-off from last season’s controversial TV series, Star Wars is sweeping history.
Seriously, why does Katherine Kennedy still have a job?
Nielsen Streaming Chart
