There will be no second season for Star Wars series The Acolyte, as it’s cancelled following a less than stellar reception to its launch.
By now you probably don’t need us to tell you that Disney’s handling of Star Wars continues to lurch from crisis to disaster. While the House of Mouse’s stewardship of the decades-long franchise has offered up the occasional win such as Andor or Rogue One, most of its films and TV shows have met with a mixed reception at best, with the feedback sometimes being decidedly worse.
Considering that the Star Wars series spent the first three or four decades of its existence primarily as a film series, we haven’t seen a movie emerge from Lucasfilm in almost five years now. The Mandalorian & Grogu is slated to arrive in the summer of 2026, although given that those characters spawned on the small screen, it’s hardly an original film that will be gracing cinemas in a couple of years’ time.
As plenty of people have pointed out, Star Wars these days is more of a TV-based franchise, but there’s been a fair few problems at that end too. Not least with the latest Disney+ live action show The Acolyte which released earlier this year to some pretty harsh reviews – and perhaps more damningly, increasingly poor viewing numbers.
Its final episode was the least-watched Star Wars finale to date and as such, it won’t be renewed for a second season – Deadline being the first outlet to report that The Acolyte has been cancelled.
Read more: The Acolyte cancelled | The season 1 questions that may never be answered
Showrunner Lesley Headland had previously spoken about pitching ideas for a second season – and there were plenty of threads left over in the first run’s finale – so the intention was certainly to continue the story, but there simply didn’t seem to be the same appetite from its audience. In our review, we called the ending ‘anticlimactic’ and we certainly weren’t alone.
A story was circulating a little while ago that Lucasfilm boss Kathleen Kennedy was looking for ‘a win’ before handing over the job to somebody else. While that was very much an unsubstantiated report, you’d have to imagine at this point that a change in leadership might be best for all involved, Kennedy included. The problem is, where will that ‘win’ come from? The next Star Wars TV show, Skeleton Crew launches December and stars Jude Law. Perhaps that show will give Lucasfilm the crowd-pleasing entertainment it’s looking for.
