How ‘The Acolyte’ Beat Star Wars ‘Skeleton Crew’

Star Wars is having somewhat of a resurgence right now. A lukewarm reception to the third season of The Mandalorian in 2023 was followed by Ahsoka which was only slightly better-received by audiences. The nadir was last year’s The Acolyte, the worst-reviewed Star Wars show in history. Then came Skeleton Crew, which captured the hearts of fans with its 1980s-inspired storyline. However, it doesn’t appear to have been enough to make its mark.

Skeleton Crew stars Jude Law as a quick-witted space pirate who has mastered the all-powerful force and befriends a group of children trying to find their way home after getting lost in the galaxy. The eight-part Disney+ streaming series is a coming of age story with similarities to beloved 1985 adventure movie The Goonies.

Like The Goonies it has been a hit with fans and critics alike. After seven episodes Skeleton Crew has earned an impressive rating of 91% from critics on review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes whilst audiences have awarded it a respectable 80%. Word about it doesn’t seem to have spread far though as Skeleton Crew didn’t make it into Nielsen’s Top 10 Original Streaming chart in its first two weeks.

Surprisingly Skeleton Crew failed to qualify despite debuting its first two episodes on the same night. During the week of its premiere the bottom spot on Nielsen’s streaming originals list was occupied by The Great British Baking Show, which was viewed for 382 million minutes meaning that Skeleton Crew came to less than that.

This puts the average per episode under 191 million minutes making it lower than the 244 million for each of The Acolyte’s first two instalments which both appeared in Nielsen’s top ten list. There may be good reason why Skeleton Crew wasn’t so lucky.

The female-focused cast of The Acolyte led to it courting controversy before it had even launched. It led to the show being branded woke and getting review-bombed. In turn, its cast and showrunner Leslye Headland had to defend its diversity and inclusivity throughout the run of the show which kept it in the public eye.

It may explain why The Acolyte’s finale returned to Nielsen’s Top 10, albeit in the the bottom place, despite the show being far from perfect in line with its 78% critics’ rating on Rotten Tomatoes and its much lower 19% audience score.

The questionable caliber of the show kept people talking, as did this author’s revelation that it cost Disney a staggering $207.8 million to make. What’s more, its diversity only appeared to be skin deep as a follow up report revealed that just 30% of the 695 employees on the show were female and across the entire workforce, women’s average hourly pay was 19.4% lower than men’s.

That fueled yet more media coverage and so did Disney’s decision to to scrap plans for a second season just over a month after the curtain came down on the first one. At times The Acolyte was the talk of the town and Disney made the most of it. As user Robert V wrote on X, “I saw ads for Acolyte after it was canceled!”

With so many talking points, it’s perhaps no surprise that The Acolyte was rarely out of the media during its run. As the chart below shows, 4,911 articles mentioned The Acolyte last year with a massive 34.6% of them coming in June when the show premiered. In contrast, Skeleton Crew was only mentioned 2,895 times in 2024 with the peak during its December debut being 21.5% lower than The Acolyte’s tally in the month it launched.

The data comes from Factiva, a search engine owned by Dow Jones which spans more than two billion articles from 33,000 news, data and information sources in 32 languages. Factiva is constantly updated so its archive is as comprehensive as they come.

There are two reasons why the media dominance of The Acolyte caused a disturbance in the force for Skeleton Crew. Firstly, it sent out a signal that Star Wars may be past its prime. Secondly it led to Star Wars fatigue making media outlets less likely to write about a solid show with no controversial angles so soon after one which became famous for all the wrong reasons.

As a result, Skeleton Crew has only attracted 59% of the coverage that The Acolyte got and it doesn’t seem to have been watched as much despite being far better reviewed. Many potential viewers may not even know that it is playing and it could have The Acolyte to thank for that. With only one episode remaining they don’t have long to find out.