Disney Says Cost, Not Quality Concerns, Killed The Acolyte
The year in Star Wars was a shaky one, but amid all the surprising big-screen announcements, the biggest earthquakes might have emanated from Disney+ series The Acolyte. The series upended a lot of Star Wars‘ most ingrained tenets, especially about the Jedi Order, and poked the feels of fans who have toxic ways of expressing themselves. Then, not long after its season ended, the show was announced as cancelled—a rare stroke of finality for Lucasfilm.
Speaking to Vulture in a wide-ranging interview that also touches on Marvel’s streaming future, among other topics, Disney’s Alan Bergman acknowledged The Acolyte‘s achievements (it was a hit, remember?). But he also had a pragmatic explanation as to why it only got one season. “As it relates to Acolyte, we were happy with our performance, but it wasn’t where we needed it to be given the cost structure of that title, quite frankly, to go and make a season two,” Bergman said. “So that’s the reason why we didn’t do that.”
As for Disney+’s current Star Wars title, the recently debuted Skeleton Crew, he said it’s too early to see what’ll be next. “Skeleton Crew is in process now, so we’ll see. We’ve seen some growth on that. We’ll see how that goes … the reviews have been excellent on Skeleton Crew, so we’ll have to see how that all plays out as it moves forward.”
That catches us up through 2024. But what about next year? “We have Andor season two, which we’re really excited about. It is excellent. I’ve watched all the episodes, and it is a fantastic season,” Bergman said. He’s the boss, so it’s not like he’s going to say anything different—but that is nice to hear, isn’t it?
There’s also Dave Filoni’s second season of Ahsoka, Bergman continued, and added, “We’re looking at a number of additional series that are in development. We’ll see what we decide to do. As I said earlier, they have to be great, and when we’re in the position where we think we have what we want, we’re going to move forward. In terms of the films, at this point we have Mandalorian, which is coming out Memorial Day of ‘26, and we’ve got a number of films that we are developing. When we’re ready, we’ll be making announcements as to what those are.”
The takeaway from that is that a lot of confirmed details about Star Wars‘ future are still up in the air—just the way Star Wars seems to like it.
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