Disney's 'The Acolyte' Has a Lower Rotten Tomatoes Score Than the Worst Show in TV History, 'The Star Wars Holiday Special'

All entertainment is subjective. Even the most acclaimed creations in our popular culture have their detractors. Hell, I've got friends who hate The Godfather films. Others who have never seen them. Taylor Swift is the most popular musical performer in the Western world, but there are probably 6 billion people who wouldn't stop to hear her music if she was singing on a sidewalk. Yet your average American teenage girl would give up all her worldly possessions and get thee to a nunnery, just for the chance to visit her backstage. To repurpose a very old Seinfeld stand-up bit, "nothing is fun for the whole family." 

As such, whenever you get 86% of the public to agree on any piece of pop entertainment, that's an impressive accomplishment. Which Disney has done with their latest Star Wars project. Just not in the way they'd hoped:

MSN - The new Disney+ series Star Wars: The Acolyte has been under heavy fire from fans ever since it was first announced. ...

After the first two episodes premiered, fans did not like the show, while many critics praised it. However, the release of the third episode ... caused many to tune out of the show, with some calling it the worst episode of any Star Wars television show. 

Initially, we reported that the RT audience score had dropped to 20%. But in less than 24 hours of that reporting, the score has since dropped again, setting a record for the show. As of the writing of this report, the series is now at an 18% audience score, meaning that the negative score has dipped below the infamous Star Wars Holiday Special.

This was published a few days ago. That number has moved since. If Disney was still pulling an 18% audience score, they'd be popping bottles in Orlando right now. 

And while the professional Film Critic class have been largely supportive, even some of them have been left with no choice but to agree this show has been an abysmal failure:

Just by way of background, since the Holiday Special in question only aired once, George Lucas has done everything in his considerable power to see that it never sees the light of day again, and the vast majority of you are too young to have seen it when it did come out, here's all you need to know:

Scan to any random moment in this ill-conceived, nightmarish, regrettable piece of television history and experience the worst that pop culture has ever produced. Harrison Ford humiliated by his contractual obligation to appear in this mess and saying his lines like he believes every word he utters brings him one syllable closer to career suicide. Mark Hamill’s face sparkled with a two inch coating of Kabuki make up and guy liner. And poor Carrie Fisher, obviously high as a lab rat And what was no doubt the peak of her substance abuse problems. 

There’s Chewbacca’s family, In cheap gorilla costumes with masks out of one of those tacky, haunted houses that pop up every Halloween seasons. Chewie’s son Lumpy watching hologram acrobats in bedazzled G-strings. Art Carney of all goddamned people giving Chewie’s dad Itchy a VR video of Dianne Carroll Singing a song/giving him space phone sex. Harvey Korman, just a few short years removed from one of the great comic performances of all time in “Blazing Saddles” Agonizingly trying to squeeze a single drop of comedy out of the rancid piss the writers gave him to work with. And Bea Arthur trying not to slice her wrists to get out of having to appear in another scene long enough that maybe someone will create a sitcom about four lovable old bags so she can put this low point of her life behind her. …

[I]t’s 1970s awfulness done to absolute perfection.

Yet Star Wars fans (I raise my medical droid-repaired mechanical hand) consider The Acolyte to be worse than that. Despite the fact Disney reportedly spent $180 million to produce eight 30-minute episodes of this dreck. By way of comparison, Godzilla Minus One received international acclaim, was my favorite movie of the past year, and won an Oscar for Best Visual Effects. It cost $15 million. 

And I chose the word "dreck" carefully. This is an actual scene that actually made the actual final cut:

I get that there's a larger picture here. In the times we're living in, 99% of the time a project like this is going to launch, achieve maximum altitude, then come crashing down right into the front lines of a broader culture war. In this case, Disney launched a nuke, given that Star Wars has been a part of the lives of three generations now. And that The Acolyte flips the existing canon on its head with a coven of witches renaming The Force "The Thread" and a pair of twin, Force-sensitive girls being conceived by two lesbian moms. And where the Jedi are portrayed as a cult of weirdos who snatch children away from their homes and who might actually commit mass murder.

The traditional fans blame the woke corporations poisoning everything they once loved and ruining their childhoods. The producers are going to blame the -ists and -phobes in the toxic fandom review bombing everything because they're intolerant. It's exactly the same dynamic we've seen play out with pretty much every major IP lately, including Marvel, Indiana Jones, Doctor Who, and Amazon's Lord of the Rings spinoff. And it will keep repeating on an endless loop. A snake eating its own tail. Until studios decide they're sick of failure and alienating their target audience and go back to creating popular entertainment that is actually, you know, popular. 

Personally, I don't care if studios choose to lean on identity politics in hopes of attracting a wider audience. It's no skin off my pale, Caucasian ass if no one in the cast looks like me. That was true of the aforementioned Godzilla movie and I loved it. I hated The Holiday Special despite the fact I'm a dead ringer for a young Harrison Ford. Where I draw the line is when the storytelling sucks. Watch that trailer again and show me not where the white guys are - because again I don't care - but where the fun is. This is dreary, somber, self-serious, pretentious bullshit. The kind of amateurish hackery that looks like it was made by someone who thinks that a dark, grim tone is how you express weighty and important issues. Essentially the sort of person who learned about life in film school instead of actually living it. 

But what I really can't stand is creators slapping their own points of view on some other, more talented artistic geniuses work and passing it off as their own. If you want to make a series about a witch coven standing up against a cult of creepy space wizards, by all means, have at it. I want to watch that. Just quit trying to undo the works of the giants whose shoulders your standing on. Lucas, Spielberg, Stan Lee. And above all, keep your Orc paws off Tolkien. 

Another gifted, visionary, world-building fiction creator put it best:

"Everywhere you look, there are more screenwriters and producers eager to take great stories and 'make them their own.' It does not seem to matter whether the source material was written by Stan Lee … Ian Fleming, Roald Dahl, Ursula K. Le Guin, J.R.R. Tolkien, Mark Twain … Jane Austen, or… well, anyone.  No matter how major a writer it is, no matter how great the book, there always seems to be someone on hand who thinks he can do better, eager to take the story and 'improve' on it.   'The book is the book, the film is the film,' they will tell you, as if they were saying something profound. Then they make the story their own. They never make it better, though. Nine hundred ninety-nine times out of a thousand, they make it worse"

--George RR Martin

Unfortunately it's too late to save Star Wars. It was on life support in a Bacta Tank long before this show killed it, and there's no coming back. Disney can't claim 85% of the fans are wrong.