Wake Up, Go Broke: Disney Cancels Gay Star Wars Series After One Season

Over the past decade, Disney has built a reputation for failure. Consider the impressive catalog of marketable properties the company has acquired through its acquisitions of companies like 20th Century Fox and Lucasfilm: the possibilities for profit are endless. Star Wars itself has long been considered a stalwart brand, a beloved franchise to which hundreds of millions (perhaps billions) of fans were attached out of sheer nostalgia.

It would take a mistake of phenomenal magnitude for Star Wars to be a failure. Or perhaps a deliberate attempt to deconstruct and destroy the very foundations of the story that made it so popular in the first place.

The Acolyte, directed by Leslye Headland, a former assistant to Harvey Weinstein, and produced by Kathleen Kennedy, a former assistant to Steven Spielberg, is the pinnacle of this program. Kennedy’s famous “Story Group” set out to fundamentally change Star Wars from the beginning by injecting it with more and more third-wave feminism, woke ideology, and, ultimately, sexual fetishism.

They first tested the waters with a strange young adult novel series called “The High Republic,” which hit shelves in less than a year. The Acolyte was an attempt to double down on The High Republic in the television/streaming format. The goal? To turn a story about the fundamental roots of love, friendship, responsibility, good and evil into a degenerate tale of moral relativism and identity politics. Headland was given a $180 million budget and incredible creative control by Lucasfilm.

In The Acolyte, the Jedi are the bad guys (and they all get murdered by the end), the Sith are portrayed as endearing and justified characters, the lesbian space witches reproduce by immaculate conception, and the high-concept adventure takes a back seat to discussion, discussion, discussion. The original audience for Star Wars was always overwhelmingly male. The new audience was not just for women, but for feminist women. It was a recipe for financial disaster.

The Acolyte has now officially been canceled, with Disney and Lucasfilm announcing that they have no plans to pursue a second season. While Disney initially boasted that the series would be the “most-watched” on Disney Plus in 2024 (as there was very little competition), Nielsen’s numbers for streaming originals indicated that the series failed to crack the top 10 most-watched streaming originals in four of the seven weeks it was on the air.

Unsurprisingly, woke activists are up in arms. They claim that the show was sabotaged by the “criticism bombardment” of “racists and misogynists.” In reality, there is no such thing as “criticism bombardment.” A show either has a large audience or it doesn’t. It either appeals to a large group of consumers or it doesn’t. If most people hate a show that isn’t a criticism bombardment, that’s the free market (which leftists despise). A show doesn’t deserve to stay on the air simply because it has the “right politics.”

A little compilation of TikToks reacting to the cancellation of The Acolyte. Enjoy🩷 pic.twitter.com/MjYwSChzw5

— Steph Anie (@mynerdyhome) August 21, 2024

Activists say canceling the show is “letting the bigots win.” The most important question left-wing activists need to ask is: Where were they? If this show has such a large audience, why didn’t they come out and fight the “bigots” themselves?

The reason companies like Disney often hide the real numbers isn’t just a matter of financial optics. They also know that the woke left is a paper tiger, an astroturf movement based primarily on social media and college campuses, with barely a footprint in the real world. The more these shows and movies fail, the more this fact becomes apparent and the con game is exposed.

George Lucas’s space opera extravaganza began as a love letter to the sci-fi and adventure series of the 1940s and 1950s. It was combined with an homage to Akira Kurosawa’s “The Hidden Fortress,” and, most importantly, it followed the narrative rhythms of Joseph Cambell’s study of inherent symbolism called “The Hero’s Journey.” The archetypal nature of Star Wars, its clear delineations between good and evil, the path to the dark side, and the existence of the Jedi (the ultimate good of the universe) appeal to the human subconscious in a way that Hollywood didn’t initially understand.

They’ve tried over and over again to copy the formula, but they’ve failed, because, frankly, Hollywood isn’t run by normal humans, it’s run by narcissists and psychopaths. They’re not going to succeed because they can’t relate to it. But because Star Wars made so much money, Lucas was left to his own devices.

But in our dark cultural era, money is no longer as important to ideologues as it once was. They consider profits secondary to propaganda, and if a film or streaming series does not convey the right message, it is unlikely to be made. On the other hand, if a production has the right rhetoric, the right ethnic diagram of people and sexual orientations, it will probably be made even if it is terribly poorly written and the creators are incompetent. The multicultural cult of globalism must be at the forefront of the public’s mind at all times; regardless of whether it is entertained or not.

The problem is that woke cultists made a flawed assumption: they believed that by saturating the market with woke images and messages, the public would eventually give up, submit, and consume whatever product they were given without question. In other words, Disney and its ilk believed that the population could be brainwashed into conformity over time.

That’s not what happened. In fact, the public has become more perceptive and savvy. And you can’t feed a big company ideology, it has to start making money again. That’s why The Acolyte was canceled and why this event probably heralds the beginning of the end of woke content in general.