The Acolyte, the latest live-action Star Wars show on Disney Plus, was released Tuesday to little fanfare. After the low viewership for Ahsoka, season three of The Mandalorian, and the poor reviews for Kenobi, the science fiction franchise’s foray into television is looking like a mistake. However, this is not due to a lack of demand; it is Disney’s unrelenting attack on the Star Wars fanbase and continued insistence on pushing culture war issues instead of focusing on quality.
The Acolyte has been described as “the gayest Star Wars,” which was intentional by Leslye Headland, the LGBT activist who created it. Headland has joked that “R2D2 is a lesbian” and said that “there’s just no way that me being a queer woman is not going to be reflected in my work.” One of the stars of the show also proclaimed that “nerds are gay” and “Star Wars is so gay already.” Needless to say, The Acolyte is not exactly designed to please established Star Wars fans, who have been all but abandoned by Disney since the company purchased Lucasfilm in 2012.
When Star Wars: The Force Awakens was released in 2015, it dominated pop culture and the box office, received rave reviews, and became one of the highest-grossing films of all time. Four years later, the trilogy it launched concluded with a whimper, as Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker became both a critical failure and a financial disappointment.
Trouble started brewing for Disney after fans responded negatively to the second film in the sequel trilogy, The Last Jedi. While the criticisms of that movie had more to do with convoluted storytelling and bad writing, the media responded by accusing the Star Wars fan base of misogyny because the film had a thinly-veiled feminist message.
This launched a full-scale fan revolt that Disney still has not recovered from, as the entertainment company has shown little to no interest in fixing its problems. The highly-anticipated Kenobi series, which brought back legacy characters including Darth Vader, was given a tiny budget, while projects starring Disney-created characters were given twice as much funding. Additionally, the next theatrical Star Wars film is set to be directed by Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy, a feminist journalist who proclaimed that “it’s about time that we had a woman come forward to shape a story in a galaxy far, far away.”
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Disney’s troubles expanded far beyond the Star Wars franchise, and again, they were rooted in the company pushing left-wing issues instead of focusing on quality. The once-thriving Marvel Cinematic Universe has had a series of bombs on television and at the box office, with that franchise’s embrace of political rhetoric becoming as tiresome as it is puzzling. Last year’s Indiana Jones: The Dial of Destiny was another theatrical catastrophe, mostly due to the eponymous character being sidelined in favor of a female lead. Even the company’s animation wing has struggled, with the films Lightyear and Strange World bombing largely due to backlash about the inclusion of LGBT characters.
Star Wars is one of the biggest franchises of all time, so Disney choosing to run it into the ground is such a baffling decision. When viewers turn on Star Wars, they do not want to be preached at, they simply want to be entertained.