You just knew she was going to say this. “The Acolyte” star Amanda Stenberg is blaming the show’s cancelation on racist fans. Why not? Dissing fans will surely solve LucasFilm’s myriad of problems.
Stenberg went on her IG to claim that the show getting dropped was “not a huge shock” due to the extreme vitriol from Star Wars fans. “There has been a rampage of vitriol that we have faced since the show was even announced… a rampage of, I would say, hyper-conservative bigotry and vitriol, prejudice, hatred and hateful language towards us.”
She added, “it has been an incredible honor and dream for me to be in this universe” and the audiences who did watch the show “were deeply loved and appreciated, and it made this job all the worthwhile for me.”
We shouldn’t forget that Stenberg practically self-sabotaged herself and the show by releasing a cringe-inducing and self-indulgent diss track a few months back. The song lyrics directly addressed “white people crying” over the show. This was after she responded to the fan criticism by blatantly implying that the haters were “silly racists.”
You can bet that if “The Acolyte” was any good, or had high viewership numbers, then Disney would have never pulled the plug on it. It’s as simple as that. Fact was that “The Acolyte” was not as popular as “Andor” and it certainly didn’t come anywhere near The Mandalorian’s numbers.
“The Acolyte” had a budget of $180M over just 8 episodes (that’s practically the same budget as ‘Dune 2’. However, ask Stenberg and she’ll tell you toxic fans were to blame for the poor writing, acting, and over blown budget.
We still haven’t heard anything from ‘Acolyte’ showrunner Leslye Headland (“Russian Doll”). She claimed to be a “Star Wars” super fan, but that wasn’t enough reason for people to watch her show. The first episode had high numbers, but viewership kept freefalling as the season went along. The series disappeared from the Nielsen’s charts after its third episode.