Recently, Disney canceled The Acolyte, a show everyone seems to have opinions about but apparently no one really watched. If you’ve heard anything about the show, which explored a mystery surrounding the Sith’s rise to power in an era long before the prequels, it may have been about the supposed controversy that divided so-called Star Wars fans since its season premiere in June.
The Acolyte was a real departure from the norm of Star Wars. Showrunner Leslye Headland created a story that engaged with the lore of the evil Sith and noble Jedi, introducing more adult themes and moral gray areas than we’ve seen in a franchise George Lucas started more than 40 years ago. It explored abuse of power and showcased nuanced BIPOC characters and a refreshing level of queerness.
All of which led to the loudest voices online deeming it “too woke,” review-bombing episodes before they even aired, and directing the kind of racist hate towards its star Amandla Stenberg that echoed what John Boyega experienced when he joined the sequel films starting with The Force Awakens in 2015. In a time when fandom has consumed culture–whether you are talking about Marvel movies, Beyonce or TV shows with dragons–over the last several years Star Wars fans have increasingly been associated with toxicity, with a vocal minority nevertheless having the power to get Disney worried.
After my initial shock at The Acolyte’s cancellation and my quick movement through several of the stages of grief, I got stuck for a while at anger, then guilt. I couldn’t help but wonder if I hadn’t been vocal enough for my opinion to matter. I’m a 40-year-old brown woman who has loved Star Wars all her life. I absolutely loved The Acolyte; it’s my second favorite recent installment in Star Wars next to Tony Gilroy’s Andor. Perhaps I should have shouted louder. I don’t need to prove my Star Wars nerd credentials to anyone, but in this current climate, in which the most vocal fans are the most regressive, maybe that’s precisely what’s required to change the perception of just who Star Wars fans are and what they look like.
I grew up surrounded by extended family all under the same roof, in a household that’s typical in the South Asian diaspora, whether in the UK (as I was) or elsewhere. My uncles and cousins were my gateway into Star Wars: watching Return of the Jedi aged four or five and living for the Ewoks. Things only accelerated for me when the original trilogy special edition was re-released in 1997. My teen years were spent lost in Expanded Universe novels and early online fan communities (Han Solo Webring, anyone?). It was a time in which I could barely dream of representation in something like Star Wars; the best was my attempts at Mary Sueing myself into the fanfiction that I of course wrote. While showing up to high school with my talking Stormtrooper keychain on my backpack certainly did not make me popular, Star Wars and its fandom truly helped define me in ways that I’m grateful for.
Of course, the idea of the gatekeeper existed back then. But at best, it was about knowing obscure lore, like the cargo capacity of a YT-1300 Corellian freighter, or the origins of Lando Calrissian’s administrative assistant, Lobot. It wasn’t whining over black or gay people existing in space and using the Force.
Leslye Headland is exactly the kind of showrunner and Star Wars fan the franchise needs – someone who loves the universe (Darth Plagueis!) and digs deep into lore (bleeding a kyber crystal!), but also clearly loves and understands the material enough to treat it like an adult—an adult who also happens to love incredible wire-work fight choreography. The Acolyte was a feast for those of us who had decades of theory percolating in our heads, but that doesn’t mean it was without faults. The show had some issues with pacing, the dialogue could sometimes be flat, and the story being told out of order sometimes made it confusing. However, you could argue those same risks were very Star Wars; telling a Rashomon-esque story nods to Lucas’ own ahem borrowing from Kurosawa.
What does it mean if you can be a fan like myself, or like Headland, and have The Acolyte be so easily discarded, not just by so-called fans furious about its content, but by Disney? Under Disney’s stewardship, we’ve entered an era in which so many of us who loved the stories but didn’t feel represented by them could finally see ourselves in a galaxy far, far away. But Disney’s handling of these issues of representation hasn’t been a straight line; it’s gone through cycles, mirroring the way these things have also played out in wider culture.
We saw the first wave of this with Disney’s handling of the “sequel trilogy” and the frustrating cycles of hyping-then-sidelining characters played by John Boyega and Kelly Marie Tran (something Boyega has spoken out about). But the online toxicity around Star Wars reached a crescendo with Rian Johnson’s The Last Jedi in 2017, notably the portrayal of Luke Skywalker as anything but The Most Special Boy, now a bitter man grappling with problematic legacies. Even white male saviors get the blues, which was apparently a bridge too far for some.
The toxic fan pushback against The Last Jedi led to the sidelining of Boyega and Tran’s characters in the final installment of the sequel trilogy, Rise of Skywalker in 2019, alongside a confusing reversal of many of the storylines that Rian Johnson had been setting up. With such infamously lazy examples of dialogue, as “somehow, Palpatine returned," The Rise of Skywalker was by far the worst Star Wars movie to date. It felt like it erred on the side of nonsense just so it could take the fewest risks, a reversal of the more nuanced, progressive, and adult path that could’ve been taken.
Of course, just a year after The Rise of Skywalker debuted, America underwent its so-called racial reckoning when the murder of George Floyd sparked widespread protests (in which John Boyega not only engaged in activism, but also during which he publicly called out Disney for his treatment), as well as a trend of corporations and institutions pledging a total of billions to fighting racial inequity.
In the couple of years that followed, Disney refreshingly followed these wider commitments to diversity at the time, and came to the defense of two more of its Black actors and hosts: namely, in 2021 when Krystina Arielle, host of official Star Wars YouTube show The High Republic, came under racist attack, as well as Moses Ingram for her portrayal of the Sith inquisitor Reva in Obi-Wan in 2022. In both cases, Disney released statements standing by these Black women, for which John Boyega even praised Disney. Of course this time, when Amandla Stenberg, protagonist of The Acolyte, was subject to the racist abuse from fans, there was no such statement of defense issued from Disney or Lucasfilm; she was left to stand up for herself against the toxic fans.
Disney’s commitments to supporting its diverse stars and creators, even in the face of vitriolic attack, has waxed and waned over the last few years, following the same pattern as the wider landscape. We’re now in an era in which there is a worrying tide of pushback against inclusion, from affirmative action in college admissions to corporations abolishing DEI. That so many of the diversity initiatives and supposed financial commitments that were set up in the wake of George Floyd were reversed speaks to this too, when it turned out that the work required was harder and more complex than they’d bargained for. The capitalist incentive for companies to pursue diverse representation has been well laid out many times: to expand a total addressable audience, bringing in new and untapped audiences that can look better for the bottom line. Yet for many executives and investors, if these new audiences don’t materialize immediately in the face of systemic bias, these offerings seem quick to be dropped.
We’re also in a time in which economic forces drive what gets made and who gets to make it – and one thing we know is that in a time of economic downtown, marginalized folks bear the brunt of cuts across different sectors.
In the games industry, there have been countless layoffs and studio closures over the last 12 months across the board. More recently, my own studio, Glow Up Games, has been amongst them, as we were unable to continue surviving against the structural issues leading to the huge funding gap for marginalized founders. Therefore, the ways in which the systems that be could do better in supporting creators telling stories outside of the mainstream feels particularly close to home for me.
There’s no one single explanation for why The Acolyte wasn’t renewed. The show was expensive to make, costing $180 million, and had comparatively low viewership against many other Disney Star Wars shows. However, comparing this to Andor, which had an even higher budget at $250 million, and similarly low viewership, it’s tough to overlook the fact that one large difference lays in how vitriolic the response to The Acolyte has been. It's even possible that the low viewership potentially resulted from the narrative surrounding the show.
The toxic enclaves in the Star Wars fanbase have taken The Acolyte’s cancellation as a win, regardless of the reason. The conversation around both the show and its cancellation has been about that fanbase, instead of a structural perspective on how to support different kinds of stories being told.
Whatever the reason for The Acolyte’s cancellation, Disney needs to ask itself which fans they’re validating and what stories they’re cultivating with the shows they produce and stand by. No single show, movie, or video game exists on hope or magic; they’re the work of creative people and investors with money, the place those people meet to create a vision. Institutions such as Disney need to understand that if you're going to invest in marginalized creators who are taking big swings, you need to afford them the same shape of the opportunities being given to the ‘safer bets’: Andor, for instance, was reportedly greenlit as a two-season show. There needs to be a commitment to weathering the cycles of cultural pushback. This is true not just in movies or games and TV, but in any industry.
The Acolyte felt like it was for me. It continued the threads that The Last Jedi only began to tease: the idea that the Force is much bigger than just the heroes we’ve become accustomed to seeing in Star Wars. It was a story that showed love for Star Wars while criticizing its sacred trope of the fight between space cops and space fascists. More than that, The Acolyte and The Last Jedi made a case for why expansive storytelling is critical in an era of omnipresent entertainment driven by multinational corporations, when fandoms that make space for everyone are necessary to survival.
In this time in which Star Wars is locked in an unwinnable battle over which fans matter, I find myself wondering what some of those other fans I was in community with as a Star Wars internet teen are doing now, especially many of those who were young women predisposed to obsessing and writing fic. Always quirky, often queer. It's very likely that Leslye Headland was among them, too. It feels like she was one of us who got just to begin telling her Star Wars story, found fans like me with whom it resonated deeply, and then had that opportunity ripped away. With every decision the company makes, Disney is telling fans, critics and shareholders what kinds of voices matter to them.
