The power of one. The power of two. The power of many. But perhaps not quite the power one would need to turn back the inevitable. Disney cancelled The Acolyte last month after abysmal ratings and lukewarm reviews, as viewership fell with every episode of the first lackluster season. Now, fans have joined forces to sign a petition and plead with the House of Mouse to give the series a second chance.
The show was certainly divisive, but it appears the vast majority of Star Wars fans simply don’t care enough about its fate to sign a petition to save it. The Acolyte’s most vociferous fans continue to champion a renewal on social media, reddit and other corners of the internet, but it’s increasingly obvious that this is little more than a vocal minority.
We’ll look at several petitions side-by-side to illustrate my point, starting with The Acolyte. This petition has garnered just over 72,000 signatures as of this writing. That’s quite a few signatures compared to many TV-related Change.org petitions. Of course, Star Wars has a massive fanbase, so you’d expect big numbers.
However, several other petitions lead me to believe that support for The Acolyte within the Star Wars community is actually pretty tepid. For instance, this petition to restore deleted scenes in Bridgerton’s third season has over 75,000 signatures. Bridgerton is certainly a popular Netflix series, but it is nowhere near as beloved as Star Wars. And this is just to restore some deleted scenes!
Another a-his torical romance series that was recently cancelled is My Lady Jane on Amazon Prime Video. Unlike The Acolyte, I really liked this show (what can I say, I have eclectic taste) and wrote about how wrong Amazon was to cancel it when I heard the news. At the time I linked to a Change.org petition that has now received 12,615 signatures. But there is actually a second My Lady Jane petition calling for a new season that has received over 66,000 signatures. Even assuming 12,000 of those are duplicates, this is still just a few thousand fewer signatures short of The Acolyte’s petition.
For a show that almost nobody has heard of before, based on a relatively little-known book, this is impressive. This many signatures for My Lady Jane, proves just how passionate its fanbase is, and how badly Amazon missed the mark. When I see practically the same number for an IP as massive as Star Wars, it’s obvious that the reverse is true—that only a small slice of the fanbase turned out and Disney was right to cancel the $180 million series. The vocal online support for this show on social media and among the media neither reflects the overall fandom’s antipathy toward The Acolyte, or the show’s quality—or lack thereof.
Now, Disney and Lucasfilm must ask tough questions about the future—and the nature—of Star Wars. Who is the target audience and core demographic, and do these two align? Who buys merchandise and movie tickets? Who brings their spouses and children with them to the movies? Who spreads hype through word of mouth?
Also: What is the fundamental nature of Star Wars? What themes and values do these stories hope to convey? What makes these stories tick and why have people connected with them on such a deep and passionate level? And how should the answers to these questions guide the future of the franchise hopefully into something coherent and compelling?
This is something I’ve discussed in my “theory of the half-interested girlfriend” which posits that if you appeal to your core demographic, the enthusiastic core fanbase will bring more casual audiences into the fold. But, if you don’t appeal to the core demographic, you’ll not only lose your most passionate fans, but all the casual fans they would have brought with them. The same would apply if the romance industry began targeting men instead of their core demographic—women! If women stopped going to chick-flicks, they wouldn’t bring their “half-interested boyfriends” along with them either.
In order to not alienate its core audience, Lucasfilm and Disney need to answer these questions and right the sinking ship. Far too many adaptations or continuations of beloved books, games or franchises, from Star Wars to Lord of the Rings and beyond, have forgotten what they truly are—instead, veering off on a bafflingly futile quest to be something for everyone.
There is a difference between broad appeal and stretching that appeal so thin that you become, for lack of a better phrase, like butter scraped over too much bread.
P.S. A reader pointed out that the Game Of Thrones petition to remake Season 8 “with competent writers” amassed over 1.8 million signatures. Nothing came of it. Another petition urging Disney to bring the Old Republic era of Star Wars to the small screen racked up 231,000 signatures. Ultimately, these petitions do very little to influence decisions at big companies, but they do reflect fan sentiment and fan sentiment over The Acolyte just doesn’t appear to be very strong.