Star Wars’ Controversial TV Show Cancellation Gets Honest, In-Depth Response From Showrunner 1 Year Later

Leslye Headland’s Star Wars TV show, The Acolyte, was the first series of its kind to officially be canceled by Lucasfilm. Featuring an all-star cast including Manny Jacinto, Amandla Stenberg, Lee Jung-jae, Charlie Barnett, and Dafne Keen, The Acolyte was subjected to a vocal online backlash. The finale aired in July 2024, and Season 2 was cancelled just one month later, with both Disney and Lucasfilm unusually open about the cancellation. According to Disney Entertainment co-chairman Alan Bergman, The Acolyte‘s viewership just didn’t match its costs.

The whole experience was a disappointing one for the Star Wars fandom, which was left badly bruised by the vehemence of the online campaign. It was even harder for the cast, many of whom have openly expressed support for one another and hopes for a second season despite it all. Now, showrunner and creator Leslye Headland has finally spoken out about The Acolyte experience in an honest, in-depth interview with The Wrap.

Leslye Headland Wasn’t Surprised By The Acolyte’s Backlash

Leslye Headland grew up with Star Wars; she devoured the old Expanded Universe novels, watched the Special Editions in 1997, and was immersed in the fandom during the prequel era. “I am a Star Wars fan, which means I have always been, since the launch of YouTube, part of the Star Wars recap/criticism/lionization fandom community,” Headland observes.

“These guys I’ve known for years and years. So when I got the information from others about what the weather report was, there was this real concern from friends of mine or co-workers of mine that saddened me. I also was like, ‘I know who these guys are.’ You don’t have to tell me who’s talking about it or how bad it is online, I know exactly who they are. I supported them on Patreon.

There are some of them that I respect, and there are some of them that I think are absolutely snake oil salesmen, just opportunists. Then, of course, there are the fascists and racists. So it runs a gamut. It isn’t just one thing or the other.

So I think that if you’re in part of the fandom, you understand the genre and the tone of particular channels and creators. So in some ways I wasn’t surprised, and then in other ways I was disappointed.”

As Headland notes, there is an entire industry of content creators who prosper from Star Wars. “There’s a lot of money to be made,” she adds, “through viewer-based ad revenues and their Patreons… That is a proper business model rather than a bunch of mean people. It’s a lot more financial than I think people realize, and as somebody that really has supported a lot of those channels financially and with my eyeballs, some of that stuff is probably the only content that a younger generation is seeing.” Controversy sells, so there’s a financial incentive to generate a backlash (at least in the short-term).

The Acolyte’s Cancellation Wasn’t A Surprise To Headland Either

Given the backlash and the source material – The Acolyte draws heavily from prequel aesthetics and High Republic novels, opening up a new part of the timeline – there’s a sense in which the show was always a risk for Lucasfilm. “It’s the old adage of the first one through the wall is the bloodiest,” Headland comments, but then recalls that viewership numbers and the online backlash made the cancellation feel inevitable. “Once I was getting particular phone calls about the reaction and the criticism and the viewership, I felt like ‘OK, the writing’s on the wall for sure,’” Headland remembers.

What did surprise her, though, was “the swiftness of it and the publicness” of The Acolyte‘s cancellation. The Acolyte wasn’t the first Star Wars TV show to stumble, but Lucasfilm usually remain quiet about the cancellation; The Book of Boba Fett was essentially cancelled after disappointing viewership and poor critical response, but the studio has never explicitly said as much. With The Acolyte, the cancellation was unusually public. Headland carefully avoids exploring this point in any further detail.

How the Death of Streaming Affected The Acolyte

The last few months have seen heated discussion about The Acolyte‘s budget, with Forbes in particular poring over financial records that are publicly available given the show filmed in the U.K. According to those, The Acolyte had an eye-watering $230 million budget, which perhaps explains why viewership needed to be high to sustain demand. But it’s important to note that the show was born in a different age, under a different business model. Reflecting on the industry, Headland points out:

“I think that the streaming bubble is now bursting, and I think that started around COVID. It just started to feel like the amount of money that was going to have to be spent on eight to 10 episodes of television, that business model dwindled. It started to become something like well what are we pivoting to? There hasn’t been something that’s been ushered in to take its place.”

Studios Are Misunderstanding the Relationship Between Franchises & Fandoms

Star Wars, meanwhile, is in a particularly interesting place. Headland moved on from thinking about toxic fandoms and the like, instead focusing on the business models of content creators. “It made me start to think, rather than these fans are toxic, or this thing is being mean to me, it made me think more that the content being made about Star Wars will ultimately be more culturally impactful than actual Star Wars. I believe we’re headed into that space.” While the IPs will continue to make money, she suggests, it will be the content created that is truly influential with the next generation.

The problem, though, is that Headland doesn’t think the studios have understood this yet. “There is a misunderstanding between the studios and that engagement,” she explains. “They think of it as fandom, and in ways it is, but studios use it almost like a focus group.”

The Acolyte’s Season 2 Plans

There’s still a vocal push from some parts of the fandom for The Acolyte Season 2, especially after a cliffhanger ending that introduced Palpatine’s own Sith mentor, Darth Plagueis, on-screen for the first time. Headland and her team had some basic plans, more focused on the emotional arc they wished to follow than anything else, because they knew the death of Lee-jung Jae’s Master Sol changed the dynamic completely.

“We definitely were thinking about that, specifically with Manny Jacinto’s character. We always knew that Lee-jung Jae was going to be the emotional anchor of the first season, watching the deterioration of that father figure. So we had already thought ahead and thought about what type of relationship we wanted to look at in the second season. We had talked about all of that from a thematic and character standpoint, but in terms of actual narrative, there were only a couple sign posts that we knew we wanted to hit. “

For now, of course, these Season 2 plans look extremely unlikely – not least because Lucasfilm appear to be slowing down in terms of producing live-action Star Wars TV shows. The Acolyte‘s cancellation left the Star Wars fandom divided, and engagement with the franchise has lessened significantly since then. Lucasfilm will be hoping that next year’s The Mandalorian and Grogu, which takes Star Wars back to the big screen, will change that.

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