In the past 10 years Disney has generated a magnificent reputation for failure. Consider for a moment the overwhelming catalog of marketable properties the company has purchased through its acquisition of companies like 20th Century Fox and Lucasfilm - The possibilities for profits are endless. Star Wars itself was long considered to be a bulletproof brand, a beloved franchise that had hundreds of millions (perhaps billions) of fans attached to it due to sheer nostalgia alone.
It would take a screw-up of epic proportions to take a loss on Star Wars. Or, maybe a deliberate agenda to deconstruct and destroy the very foundations of the story that made it so popular in the first place.
The Acolyte, directed by Harvey Weinstein's former assistant Leslye Headland and produced by Steven Spielberg's former assistant Kathleen Kennedy, is the pinnacle of this agenda. Kathleen Kennedy's notorious 'Story Group' set out to fundamentally change Star Wars from the very beginning with the increasing injection of third-wave feminism, woke ideology and ultimately sexual fetishism.
They first tested the waters through a bizarre series of young adult novels called 'The High Republic', which ended up on clearance shelves within a year. The Acolyte was an attempt to double down on the High Republic in television/streaming format. The goal? To turn a story about the basic roots of love, friendship, responsibility and good and evil into a degenerate tale of moral relativism and identity politics. Headland was given a $180 million budget and an incredible amount of creative control by Lucasfilm.
In the Acolyte, the Jedi are the bad guys (and they are all murdered in the end), the Sith are portrayed as relatable and justified, lesbian space witches reproduce through immaculate conception and high concept adventure takes a back seat to talking, talking, talking. The original audience for Star Wars has always been predominantly male. The new audience was intended to not just be female, but feminist females. It was a recipe for financial disaster.
The Acolyte has now officially been cancelled with Disney and Lucasfilm announcing they have no intention of pursuing a second season. Though Disney initially boasted about the series being the "most watched" on Disney Plus in 2024 (because there was very little competition), Nielsen numbers for streaming originals indicated the show did not make the cut for the top 10 most viewed streaming originals during four of the seven weeks it was on the air.
Not surprisingly, woke activists are in an uproar. They claim that the show was sabotaged by the "review bombing" of "racists and misogynists". In reality, there is no such thing as "review bombing." Either a show has a large audience, or it doesn't. Either it appeals to a wide group of consumers, or it doesn't. If most people hate a show that's not review bombing, that's the free market (which leftists despise). A show does not deserve to remain on the air simply because it has the "right politics".
A small compilation of TikTok reacting to The Acolyte being canceled. Enjoy🩷 pic.twitter.com/MjYwSChzw5
— Steph Anie (@mynerdyhome) August 21, 2024
Activists claim the cancellation of the show is the same as "letting the bigots win." The bigger question that leftists need to ask themselves is this: Where were they? If this show has such a large audience, why didn't they show up and fight the "bigots" themselves?
The reason companies like Disney often hide the real numbers is not only because of financial optics - They also know that the woke left is a paper tiger, an astroturf movement based mainly on social media and college campuses with barely a footprint in the real world. The more these shows and films bomb, the more that fact becomes apparent and the con game is exposed.
George Lucas' space opera extravaganza started out as a love letter to the sci-fi and adventure serial shows of the 1940s and 1950s. It was combined with a homage to Akira Kurosawa's film 'The Hidden Fortress' and, most importantly, it followed the story beats of Joseph Cambell's study on inherent symbology titled 'The Hero's Journey.' The archetypal nature of Star Wars, it's clear delineations on good and evil, the path to the dark side and the existence of the Jedi (the ultimate good in the universe) appeals to the human subconscious in a way that Hollywood did not understand at first.
They tried many times to copy the formula to no avail, because, frankly, Hollywood is not run by normal humans, it's run by narcissists and psychopaths. They aren't going to get it because they are incapable of relating to it. But since Star Wars made loads of money, Lucas was left to his own devices.
In our current cultural dark age, however, money is not as important to the ideologues as it used to be. They see profits as secondary to propaganda and if a film or streaming series does not convey the proper messaging it is unlikely to be made at all. On the other hand, if a production has all the right rhetoric, the correct ethnic pie chart of people and sexual orientations then it will probably be made even if it's terribly written and the creators are incompetent. The multicultural cult of globalism must be front and center in the public mind at all times; it doesn't matter if they are entertained or not.
The thing is, the woke cultists made a faulty assumption: They believed that if they saturated the market with woke imagery and messaging that eventually the public would give up, submit, and consume whatever products they were fed without question. In other words, Disney and their ilk believed the populace could be brainwashed into compliance over time.
This has not happened. In fact, audiences have become more discerning and savvy. And, you can't feed a vast corporation on ideology, eventually you have to start bringing in profits again. This is why The Acolyte was canceled and why this event likely heralds the beginning of the end for woke content in general.
