‘The Acolyte’ Is Canceled After Just One Season

Christian Zilko
·2 min read
4

Any “Star Wars” fans who were excited about the new developments introduced in the Season 1 finale of “The Acolyte” should brace for disappointment. The Disney+ series created by Leslye Headland and starring Amandla Stenberg and Manny Jacinto has been canceled after a single season, IndieWire has confirmed.

The cancellation marks an abrupt ending for a series that was polarizing from the beginning. Headland’s series — which takes place one hundred years before the Prequel Trilogy and follows the mystery behind a series of Jedi murders — faced a predictable level of online outrage from the beginning, possibly due to its break from franchise conventions, its diverse creative team, or some combination thereof.

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But an equally passionate segment of the “Star Wars” fan base praised the show for bringing some much-needed creative risk-taking to the franchise. As Lucasfilm continues to consolidate its “Star Wars” output around proven commodities like “The Mandalorian” and its spin-offs (and upcoming film “The Mandalorian and Grogu”), many saw the bold storytelling of “The Acolyte” as helping to keep the flame of creativity alive in a franchise that otherwise risked stagnation. Fans speculated for weeks about the identity of the Sith Lord, and then, once his identity was revealed, how he might connect to Darth Plagueis.

“The best Star Wars projects in recent years are the ones that stray from the original story,” IndieWire’s Proma Khosla wrote in her review of the series. “From ‘Rogue One’ to ‘The Last Jedi’ to the animated ‘Visions’ and last year’s ‘Andor,’ the franchise finds its footing by taking risks and focusing on original stories that just happen to be set in a galaxy far, far away. With the middling quality of so many other Star Wars offshoots since Disney+ launched in 2019, Leslye Headland‘s ‘The Acolyte’ finds company, mercifully, in the former category, with an intriguing crime thriller set further back than any other live-action entry.”

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