The Star Wars series will not get a second season

The Acolyte will not be continued – no new episodes of the Star Wars series will land on Disney Plus. Image source: Disney/Lucasfilm

No, The Acolyte will not have a second season. Disney and Lucasfilm have pulled the plug on the controversial Star Wars series – as several major websites (for example Deadline and Variety) report.

The Acolyte was hotly debated and sometimes harshly criticized among Star Wars fans. Nevertheless, viewers who were hoping for answers to many unanswered questions will probably be disappointed by this news. The Acolyte was clearly designed to run for several seasons, as showrunner Leslye Headland also emphasized.

Why The Acolyte is not being continued

However, this development is not all that surprising. The Acolyte only managed to convince the press to a limited extent, while a lot of justified and well-founded criticism from the community was overshadowed by hate-fueled review bombing. Meanwhile, the viewing figures left a lot to be desired.

Although The Acolyte got off to a strong start when it debuted on Disney Plus on June 4, 2024, the Star Wars series was unable to sustain those numbers, with fewer and fewer viewers tuning in in the weeks that followed. According to Deadline, the finale of The Acolyte will have the lowest ratings of any Star Wars series to date.

Da The Acolyte wohl a budget of more than 100 million US dollars (not unusual for series of this size, by the way), it is not too surprising that Disney is now pulling the plug. Previously, Leslye Headland had spoken openly about potential plans for a second season and that she would hope to be able to continue her story.

This is what the author thinks: In my opinion, it’s a shame that The Acolyte isn’t being continued. Of course, the new Star Wars series was anything but perfect. I’ve already summarized what worked and what didn’t work in my opinion in my detailed conclusion to Season 1.

To put it briefly: In my opinion, The Acolyte started off weakly and only really picked up from episode 5 onwards. While the two protagonists, Osha and Mae (Amandla Stenberg), left me shockingly cold, I hung on the every word of Jedi Master Sol (Lee Jung-jae) and young Sith Qimir (Manny Jacinto).

And the latter in particular would have had to play an important role in a potential second season, while The Acolyte would have continued to close the gap to Episode 1. And this is precisely where the appeal of new episodes would have been: What would Qimir’s inevitable tragic fate look like? What kind of game is Darth Plagueis playing in the shadows, which was already unmistakably teased in the Season 1 finale? And would we perhaps even have met a young Palpatine?

We won’t get answers to these questions, at least not on Disney Plus. Who knows, maybe Lucasfilm will answer these questions at some point in the course of a novel or a comic. As a Star Wars fan, I would hope that the unfinished story of The Acolyte doesn’t fizzle out completely.