The Acolyte - Disney Plus Star Wars Series

[Seto Kaiba]

On 7/21/2024 at 11:57 PM, tekering said:

As we've already established, that's a very difficult assertion to prove these days; in the case of Star Wars, however, there are some unique indicators that suggest otherwise.

I think you may be conflating two different topics there, TBH.

As noted a few posts back, the industry is collectively still trying to figure out what metrics to use to define "success" in the direct-to-streaming market.  Increases in subscribers was a metric tossed around early on, but that proved to be a bit useless since it assumed the potential for infinite growth and that people would buy into a service for one series only.  Total hours viewed is one popular metric, but most services keep those numbers to themselves and third-party analysis is dependent on self-reporting or data reported to those third-party services.  "Engagement", which ScreenRant talked about in several of their articles about The Acolyte's performance relative to other Star Wars shows, tries to measure success via social media interaction.  Its usefulness is debatable at best because filtering out bot activity (both malicious and otherwise) is not an exact science and because it treats negative attention engagement (people getting online to talk about how a series sucks) as being the same as positive engagement.

Financial performance... well... that's objectively trackable because the companies that produce and release these shows and the merchandise for them are publicly traded and therefore issue regular (quarterly) earnings reports to shareholders disclosing the financial condition of the company and its various operating divisions.  Disney's chalked up a billion dollars in profit from the Star Wars movies they've made and that's just the ticket sales, that number doesn't home video, merchandise, attractions, etc.  As of March last, they were reporting total Star Wars revenues of about $12 billion since acquiring the franchise, excl. certain separated income streams like attractions.

Hasbro has similarly indicated that Disney Star Wars has been doing quite well, and even credited it with getting them through several years of otherwise slow business.

Star Wars demonstrably continues to be quite profitable despite the discontent of some long-time fans.  A 290% ROI on an acquisition like that is nothing to sneeze at.  If they had not bungled the sequel trilogy it probably could've been a lot more, but it's still making huge amounts of money.

 

On 7/21/2024 at 11:57 PM, tekering said:

Any Star Wars collector can tell you how badly Disney has damaged the brand simply by acknowledging how little merchandise is being produced and sold these days, compared to the glut of product available in 2015 (and furthermore, how much of that product ends up in the clearance bins and discount stores).  Marvel is suffering as well, but not nearly as badly as Star Wars; Hasbro has all-but given up on marketing toys to kids, and is instead focusing on selling directly to Star Wars collectors online instead.  Major retailers aren't buying, an obvious indicator that the property is in fact losing stupendous amounts of dosh.

If they're still posting a profit on what they do make and sell, it's still making money.

And as discussed some weeks back, quite a bit of this has more mundane explanations like overzealous ordering and market saturation.

(And of course, a number of these titles are being marketed to the more mature audience anyway which isn't going to drive toy sales to kids.)

 

 

On 7/22/2024 at 1:57 AM, Big s said:

There’s not too many things in the acolyte that are toy worthy. Most of the characters were the dullest of the dull and the ships really were mostly non existent and that one little barely a droid and a cute fuzzy thing that wasn’t cute or even likable or particularly sane. And a wookie lacking brushable hair.

If Bandai did a character kit of Smilo, I might pick it up just for fun, and practice metal weathering 

Doesn't seem to have stopped them from developing merchandise... I can see preorders for "Retro Collection" and "Black Series" figures of the characters, a replica of Smilo Ren's helmet, character lightsabers, funko pops, spinoff comics, posters, apparel, etc.

Edited July 23 by Seto Kaiba

[tekering]

41 minutes ago, Seto Kaiba said:

Disney's chalked up a billion dollars in profit from the Star Wars movies they've made and that's just the ticket sales, that number doesn't home video, merchandise, attractions, etc.  As of March last, they were reporting total Star Wars revenues of about $12 billion since acquiring the franchise, excl. certain separated income streams like attractions.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/carolinereid/2024/04/14/disneys-star-wars-box-office-profits-fail-to-cover-cost-of-lucasfilm/

43 minutes ago, Seto Kaiba said:

A 290% ROI on an acquisition like that is nothing to sneeze at.

The presentation gives the impression that Disney's Star Wars trilogy generated a 2.9 times return on the purchase of Lucasfilm as that figure is presented next to a timeline of key events in the production company's history. 

However, buried in the fine print is the revelation that the purchase price of Lucasfilm isn't even included in the ROI calculation. Instead, it is purely based on the box office performance of Disney's Star Wars trilogy, its two spinoff movies, merchandise, DVD and Blu Ray sales.

As revealed, the methodology is questionable as Disney based the ROI on the revenue generated by the movies, merchandise, DVDs and Blu Rays rather than the profit they made as it should have done. Using the revenue rather than the profit artificially inflates the result as it doesn't factor in the costs that Disney had to pay out.

[Big s]

1 hour ago, Seto Kaiba said:

Doesn't seem to have stopped them from developing merchandise... I can see preorders for "Retro Collection" and "Black Series" figures of the characters, a replica of Smilo Ren's helmet, character lightsabers, funko pops, spinoff comics, posters, apparel, etc.

I have no doubt they’ll make the stuff, but that still doesn’t make it worthy of being a toy. They’ll probably just be joining Reva in the discount bin along with Rose. I’m honestly surprised that Rose is still easily found in stores. They must’ve really gone hardcore printing that one out 

[Dynaman]

On 7/23/2024 at 2:38 AM, tekering said:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/carolinereid/2024/04/14/disneys-star-wars-box-office-profits-fail-to-cover-cost-of-lucasfilm/

The presentation gives the impression that Disney's Star Wars trilogy generated a 2.9 times return on the purchase of Lucasfilm as that figure is presented next to a timeline of key events in the production company's history. 

However, buried in the fine print is the revelation that the purchase price of Lucasfilm isn't even included in the ROI calculation. Instead, it is purely based on the box office performance of Disney's Star Wars trilogy, its two spinoff movies, merchandise, DVD and Blu Ray sales.

As revealed, the methodology is questionable as Disney based the ROI on the revenue generated by the movies, merchandise, DVDs and Blu Rays rather than the profit they made as it should have done. Using the revenue rather than the profit artificially inflates the result as it doesn't factor in the costs that Disney had to pay out.

The other side of that is the initial purchase price is a one off, the more things Disney makes the more that cost is going to be subsumed into multiple projects - till the day Disney stops making SW stuff for good.

The other other side of this is a company doesn't just want to make a profit - they want to maximize profit.  The money put into SW is making money, but could Disney have gotten a better rate of return doing something else with the money put into SW (and all the others IP they have purchased in the Iger's time)?  

[Mog]

Disney is making it way too easy to Pitch Meeting these:

 

[Big s]

2 hours ago, Mog said:

Disney is making it way too easy to Pitch Meeting these:

 

They were really kind on that one

[Raikkonen]

Well...

This thread has been a quite read.

Adding my few lines then bailing before it gets too hot around here.

- Since Disney purchased SW, it's tried it's hardest to transform a boy brand into a girl brand. It's failed. And keeps failing.

- Acolyte was always bound to step on this shattered franchise and break it into more little pieces. They hired a questionable director with the CLEAR objective to project her personal contemporary "views" which she was even open about in interviews, all while being smug as she tossed both SW lore and the basic of story telling into the bin. 

- Every Disney SW attempt has been plates filled with slimy expired member-berries.

For anyone trying to the defend any minimal millimeter of the Acolyte, then they're NOT SW FANS. They're just the perfect consumers.

Edited July 29 by Raikkonen

[Big s]

53 minutes ago, Raikkonen said:

- Since Disney purchased SW, it's tried it's hardest to transform a boy brand into a girl brand. It's failed. And keeps failing.

That’s been Disney with every franchise they purchased recently and they’ve pretty much gotten the same results and haven’t seemed to learn from their mistakes.

[Thom]

8 minutes ago, Big s said:

That’s been Disney with every franchise they purchased recently and they’ve pretty much gotten the same results and haven’t seemed to learn from their mistakes.

Which is odd since they've had great success with the 'Disney Princess' theme. You'd think it would be easy to translate that formula to another franchise. To be clear, I have very little problem with 'girl power,' in fact less than most apparently, but even I can see when they've stubbed their toes.

[Big s]

5 minutes ago, Thom said:

Which is odd since they've had great success with the 'Disney Princess' theme. You'd think it would be easy to translate that formula to another franchise. To be clear, I have very little problem with 'girl power,' in fact less than most apparently, but even I can see when they've stubbed their toes.

But the princess thing is what those films and cartoons were designed for. Imagine if someone purchased every Disney princess franchise and turned them all into the Disney Prince franchise, and I’m not talkin purple rain. Sure it might make them more accessible to bros, but imagine Mulan needing to be saved and then having her movie hijacked by a guy that keeps telling her that her suffering didn’t matter and telling her she was basically stupid for a whole movie and going out of his way to make her seem useless. Even the most dude of dudes would think that was overly cringy. Or maybe the girl from Brave got old and felt like her whole life was a mistake and had to do a pass the torch movie to some stuck up bro that is better than she ever could’ve been. Sure those ideas might be hilarious on something like a quick snl sketch, but an entire movie series like that would sink the company 

[Roy Focker]

Half the population is female. They'd be stupid not to put more women in key parts. Trying to double their audience.

Too bad  man children all start to cry when ever they see girls wearing pants playing with their toys.

[Mog]

Hmm, last I checked Princess Leia wound up grabbing a gun and doing just as much to rescue herself from the Death Star.

Oh, and she didn’t need anyone’s help in straight up killing that giant pimp-slug.

Again, it comes down to the characters and the story you tell.

[Seto Kaiba]

1 hour ago, Raikkonen said:

Since Disney purchased SW, it's tried it's hardest to transform a boy brand into a girl brand. It's failed. And keeps failing.

They've been trying to turn a boy brand into a everyone brand. 

Disney bought Lucasfilm because the Star Wars brand prints money. They want to make as much money off of their new acquisition as possible, because they are a corporation. So they are trying to make it appeal to the broadest possible audience to maximize their profit.

They're just having an absolutely miserable time trying to pull it off since they massively underestimated how invested the fandom was in the status quo. No matter what they do with it, large portions of the fandom simply will not accept it. If they try to go their own way with it, they get chewed out for not respecting the lore. If they try to color within the lines, they get chewed out for being unoriginal. So Disney is stuck swinging for the fences in the hopes that they will land a hit by sheer dumb luck because nothing else they've tried is working. They've tried copycating the originals, they've tried going their own way, they've tried writing by committee, they've tried EU style backstories and background character spin-offs...🤪

 

1 hour ago, Raikkonen said:

Acolyte was always bound to step on this shattered franchise and break it into more little pieces. They hired a questionable director with the CLEAR objective to project her personal contemporary "views" which she was even open about in interviews, all while being smug as she tossed both SW lore and the basic of story telling into the bin.

They hired a fan who treated the project like an astonishingly high budget fan film.

The writer's room was full of fans too. So the script ended up being something like a bad fanfic, full of little continuity nods and love for the source material and all those little ideas that sound super cool in a fan's imagination but don't necessarily translate well into an actual narrative. 

How they got as far as actual filming with the script in that state is a mystery for the ages. I can only imagine any executive who was shown the "power of many" scene would have been left waiting for Ashton Kutcher to jump out of the woodwork and announce that they had been Punkd.

[Big s]

6 hours ago, Roy Focker said:

Half the population is female. They'd be stupid not to put more women in key parts. Trying to double their audience.

Too bad  man children all start to cry when ever they see girls wearing pants playing with their toys.

The problem isn’t that they put females into a few key roles, but pretty much every key role and then they don’t hire writers that can give them a good story when they do. 

[Seto Kaiba]

8 hours ago, Big s said:

The problem isn’t that they put females into a few key roles, but pretty much every key role and then they don’t hire writers that can give them a good story when they do. 

Hollywood as a whole has always struggled to write female protagonists.

Disney's unwillingness to accept that trying to please everyone means you'll ultimately please nobody has just trapped them in a worse version of what other properties go through when trying to write a female protagonist.  They can't look past the character's gender, so they inevitably veer into "strong female protagonist" cliches built on the sexist tropes that they're trying to subvert and end up writing an uninteresting middle-of-the-road character that can't be too much or too little of any one trait without risking accusations of sexism or Mary Sue-dom.  They invest so much effort into making the character inoffensive that there's little to work with in terms of personality when the time comes to write a story for that character.

Star Trek's Kate Mulgrew has been pretty open about this problem since the 90's.  She opined that her character was so unevenly written because of the flip-flopping between the different female protagonist cliches that it felt like her character was undiagnosed bipolar.  The series was saved by breaking the rules and introducing a character who was too much or too little in basically every category (Jeri Ryan's Seven of Nine).

 

 

Unrelated: 

 

[Big s]

3 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

Star Trek's Kate Mulgrew has been pretty open about this problem since the 90's.  She opined that her character was so unevenly written because of the flip-flopping between the different female protagonist cliches that it felt like her character was undiagnosed bipolar.  The series was saved by breaking the rules and introducing a character who was too much or too little in basically every category (Jeri Ryan's Seven of Nine).

Chainway had a smokers rasp that made it at tough watch, so I never really got into that show. I don’t remember if her character was really bad or not, I really started to check out of the Star Trek thing with the dull Deep Space Nine show, so any references to trek are usually a bit over my head

[electric indigo]

15 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

Hollywood as a whole has always struggled to write female protagonists.

Not sure if it helps, but what was the last well-written male protagonist, specifically in Star Wars?

[Big s]

1 hour ago, electric indigo said:

Not sure if it helps, but what was the last well-written male protagonist, specifically in Star Wars?

Din was pretty good for a while till he just needed constant rescue

And never forget Wade

Edited July 31 by Big s
I guess you could also count Smilo, even though he wasn’t the main character and was barely written at all, but at least not badly written

[Seto Kaiba]

7 hours ago, electric indigo said:

Not sure if it helps, but what was the last well-written male protagonist, specifically in Star Wars?

Cassian Andor, in 2016 and 2022.

[Big s]

28 minutes ago, Seto Kaiba said:

Cassian Andor, in 2016 and 2022.

He’s a well written, but unlikeable character. But he meets the criteria for well written for sure.

[Seto Kaiba]

1 hour ago, Big s said:

He’s a well written, but unlikeable character. But he meets the criteria for well written for sure.

He's not really meant to be likeable.  He's meant to be relatable, because his story is all about how the Empire's senseless acts of oppression and petty cruelty gradually radicalized its own ordinary apolitical workaday people into open revolt and forming the seeds of the organized rebellion that would one day bring it crashing down.

 

8 hours ago, Big s said:

Din was pretty good for a while till he just needed constant rescue

Din was likeable but I wouldn't call him well-written, in large part because his story is driven by his shockingly firm and consistent grip on the idiot ball and the moon logic of the warrior cult he belongs to.

 

 

When it comes to writing, as I've often opined, I think Star Wars's biggest weakness is its obsession with Force users.  There's nothing particularly relatable about a space magic-using warrior monks living a life of self-denial and their axe crazy edgelord counterparts who dress all in black and do everything "4 teh evulz".

The Acolyte suffers from that especially badly, with most of the cast being thinly written stock characters based on all the usual Force user tropes.  It says a lot that the only likeable character is the villain who starts opining about wanting to be true to himself... after murdering like eight people.  He's only well-written in a relative sense, standing out by virtue of how utterly bland and boring everyone else in the story is.  (It is funny that his attitude is basically "What's a couple laser sword murders between friends?")

[Mog]

Carson Teva, while not exactly a main character, is another character that’s been written consistently.

Competent and experienced pilot, who has a good sense of right and wrong and knows when to let things slide/go outside the usual channels.

[Big s]

6 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

Din was likeable but I wouldn't call him well-written

I’d say he was well written for a Star Wars character, the bar is pretty low as far as writing in this franchise and being decent seems like Pulitzer material or something. Star Wars really was intended more for kids and young adults to enjoy, so most of what’s there even in live action is mostly just slightly above Saturday morning cartoons.
Andor is a bit of an exception in that it’s more targeted to the young adult crowd and above, while the Acolyte tried to bridge the gap, between being a young adult audience type show and a kids show , it kinda failed due to poor writing overall in the story department leaving the audience with a lot of story elements that weren’t cohesive or coherent and characters that seemed poorly designed making a character like Smilo Ren seem like a standout character in comparison to the mostly wooden or annoying cast of characters 

[hutch]

Acolyte.  Totally cancelled

[Mog]

Well, when you kill off the most compelling character and leave us with remaining characters I frankly don’t care for or have any remaining sympathy for, it doesn’t exactly leave much excitement for a second season.

[mechaninac]

10 minutes ago, hutch said:

Acolyte.  Totally cancelled

The Failure of One.

The Failure of Two.

The Failure of Mannyyyyy.

[Mog]

Hey, let’s not put the blame on Manny Jacinto. 

I may not personally care for the character, but he did a good job portraying the character’s chaotic evil nature.

[Thom]

No surprise. A rather uncompelling tale, with the only real standout being killed off, Jecki (along with most of the rest of the cast.)

I've said it before and I'll say it again, if you are going to do the High Republic era, do it in the beginning, not the end.

[Seto Kaiba]

Did anyone honestly think it was going to get a second season? 

The Acolyte was eight episodes of pure idiot plot starring an assortment of shallow stock characters... and Qimir.

[Duke Togo]

I don't understand how anyone looked at the plotted story and scripts and not realized that Qmir is what was interesting. And they just couldn't stop themselves from tying it into the prequels-era story.

They made the same mistake with Ahsoka. Baylon Skoll and his apprentice were the interesting story, not the cartoon stuff Feloni just can't move on from.

[Big s]

1 hour ago, Mog said:

Well, when you kill off the most compelling character and leave us with remaining characters I frankly don’t care for or have any remaining sympathy for, it doesn’t exactly leave much excitement for a second season.

The most compelling character survived actually. It’s to bad the show sucked so bad that we didn’t get to see much of him.

 

1 hour ago, Thom said:

No surprise. A rather uncompelling tale, with the only real standout being killed off, Jecki (along with most of the rest of the cast.)

I thought she was kind forgettable other than having one great scene     
still best part of the whole show 

[azrael]

‘The Acolyte’ Canceled: No Season 2 For Disney+’s ‘Star Wars’ Series (Deadline.com)

Quote

...The news is not entirely surprising. The Acolyte did OK with critics, with 78% on Rotten Tomatoes, but divided Star Wars fans, which was reflected in its overall viewership.

Driven by interest into the venerable franchise, The Acolyte got off to a strong start when it launched June 4 with two episodes, generating 4.8M views in its first day on the streamer to rank as the biggest series premiere on Disney+ this year. The tally rose to 11.1 million views globally after five days of streaming. Corroborating Disney’s data, the series made its debut on Nielsen’s Top 10 originals chart in its premiere week at No. 7 (488 million minutes viewed), climbing to No. 6 the following week.

But The Acolyte could not sustain the momentum, dropping out of the Top 10 in Week 3 and staying off before returning at No. 10 after the release of the finale (335M minutes, believed to be the lowest for a Star Wars series finale).

Like fellow global streamers Netflix and Prime Video, Disney+ has a high viewership threshold for renewing high-end, big-budget series that cost well above $100M per season to make....

If you look at the ratings on IMDB, it's almost a Bell-curve with episode 5 being the most well-received.

[Mog]

30 minutes ago, Big s said:

The most compelling character survived actually. It’s to bad the show sucked so bad that we didn’t get to see much of him.

Sorry, but chaotic evil dude who only survives because of his literal armor doesn’t make for a compelling character.

Plus, we all know he’s Verny’s old padawan, which the show would reveal as some deep dark secret late in the hypothetical second season (even though everyone would’ve already figured out the secret).

[Big s]

3 hours ago, Mog said:

Sorry, but chaotic evil dude who only survives because of his literal armor doesn’t make for a compelling character.

Plus, we all know he’s Verny’s old padawan, which the show would reveal as some deep dark secret late in the hypothetical second season (even though everyone would’ve already figured out the secret).

I didn’t say he was the greatest character, or particularly good,just that he was the most compelling in this particular show filled with absolutely lame characters and oddly made his character stand out from the bunch. And he was able to compel the main character to become the “Acolyte”

[Duke Togo]

9 hours ago, Mog said:

Sorry, but chaotic evil dude who only survives because of his literal armor doesn’t make for a compelling character.

He was neither outwardly chaotic or evil, which is what made him interesting. There was no evil cackling, mustache twirling, or constant threats of violence, which makes him a lot different than your typical Star Wars villain.