Begun, the fandom wars have. After Star Wars launched its Disney+ offerings with The Mandalorian, other Disney+ series like Andor, The Bad Batch, and Ahsoka ushered in a new age of Star Wars media. But then came The Acolyte, a series by Leslye Headland starring Amandla Stenberg as twins living in the last days of the High Republic, about a century before the prequel trilogy.
The response to The Acolyte was polarizing, with some fans decrying even the smallest changes to canon (not Ki-Adi-Mundi’s birthday!), and in late 2024, the series was unceremoniously canceled. But recent analytics reveal the issue wasn’t viewership numbers — in fact, it did better than the year’s Marvel shows.
According to analytics firm Luminate, The Acolyte was viewed for 2.673 billion minutes, ranking it second among Disney+ originals, behind only Percy Jackson & The Olympians and ahead of both Agatha All Along and Echo, the year’s contributions to the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
These numbers are estimates, not official viewership data from Disney+ itself, but if the results are even remotely accurate, then they raise some questions about Disney’s strategy. Aside from Percy Jackson, the only series to potentially one-up The Acolyte is Skeleton Crew, but because its episodes bridged 2024 and 2025, we’ll have to wait for more data.
To put these numbers in perspective, Disney+ may have a far bigger problem than whether Marvel can keep up with Star Wars. Amazon Prime Video’s video game adaptation series Fallout wasn’t marketed as heavily as The Acolyte and dropped all of its episodes at once, but it still managed 7.95 billion minutes, making it one of the top 10 series watched across all streamers.
If these numbers are accurate, then The Acolyte may not have been a massive flop... but it still may have been too expensive to make relative to Disney’s viewership base. When you spend an eyewatering $180 million on a TV show, you need to get your money’s worth. Fans will have to hope that Andor Season 2 gives The Acolyte a run for its money in a few months, and convinces Disney that streaming originals are still worth the investment.
