After The Acolyte's Cancellation, Amandla Stenberg Speaks Out

The axe has fallen for The Acolyte. While Lucasfilm was already preparing season 2, Disney+ decided not to renew the exploration of the new period of the High Republic. The ratings were not good. Despite a launch that was among the best in the history of the American platform, 5 million views for the first two episodes and from the first day, this craze quickly ran out of steam. Episode 8, the grand finale, recorded the worst ratings for a series Star Wars. Even The Book of Boba Fett had gathered more fans for its conclusion. Faced with such public disenchantment, Mickey did not hesitate, the cancellation was made official a few days after the broadcast of the last episode.

Amandla Stenberg, who plays Osha and Mae, took to social media to share her feelings about the cancellation. The actress who plays the two main characters explained on Instagram that the news wasn't really “a shock”.

“It’s not a huge surprise to me. For those who don’t know, we’ve been dealing with a wave of vitriolic comments since the show was announced, even though it was just a concept, no one had even seen it. That’s when we started experiencing a wave of hyper-conservative bigotry, prejudice, hate, and hateful language. It affected me and it’s just not something I anticipated, it’s not something you can understand until it happens to you.”

New victim of the “negative review-bombing” ?

If the audience decline of The Acolyte as it nears its conclusion is probably the main reason behind this cancellation, it must be admitted that the scathing reviews on the various review aggregators have not helped Leslie Headland's creation to build a good reputation. The Acolyte would thus have been the victim of a phenomenon which is gaining momentum: THE “negative review-bombing”. This term refers to the multiplication of bad reviews and opinions on sites aimed at lowering the popularity rating of a production. Most often, it is not directly the films or series that are concerned, but rather the casting choices, the themes discussed or even the people in charge of the project.

Until recently, many of these bad reviews were even published well before the release of the project in question. An example is Captain Marvelwho had suffered a wave of scathing criticism after Brie Larson's comments about the age and gender of journalists attending previews. A week before its theatrical release, the film already had 8,600 negative reviews on the site Rotten Tomatoes. The latter had thus had to take drastic measures to ensure the consistency of the ratings offered on its site. From now on, it is impossible to rate a film or a series before its release. The site explained at the time: “Unfortunately, we have seen an increase in non-constructive criticism, sometimes bordering on trolling, which is a disservice to our readership.”.

While the measures taken by the site help to stem this phenomenon, they cannot completely put an end to it. Users are redoubling their efforts to create multiple accounts and invade the aggregators from the first hours of availability. At the time of writing,The Acolyte shows a score of 78% for the press against 18% for the public. This score is the cumulative total of more than 25,000 ratings. For comparison, the series The Mandalorian has only garnered just over 10,000 reviews for its first season, even though it remains one of the most-watched series on Disney+.

It remains to be seen whether the cancellation of The Acolyteand the risk involved in exploring the High Republic, will discourage Disney+ from innovating. Skeleton Crew, by Christopher Ford and Jon Watts, is set to be released on Disney+ on December 3. There is no question of deviating from the main timeline here; the series will evolve between the events Return of the Jedi And Ahsoka.

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