Despite what people on the internet say, The Acolyte was the second most watched show on Disney+ last year

If you hear someone say online that "No one watched The Acolyte," perhaps send them over this little piece of facts.

Deadline is reporting that The Acolyte was the second most-watched series on Disney+ last year. It was only beaten out by Percy Jackson and the Olympians, which means it beat out the other Star Wars series which included The Bad Batch, Tales of the Empire, LEGO Star Wars: Rebuild the Galaxy, and Skeleton Crew. Though, Skeleton Crew only had half of its episodes available in 2024 as the series wrapped up its back half in January. Take that one with a grain of salt.

It must be said that all streaming was down across the board, according to the report from Luminate. This wasn't just a Disney+ and Star Wars thing. Netflix and Prime Video both suffered losses as Hollywood bounces back from the WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes in 2023.

We're also seeing the results of a broken streaming model where streaming has heavily focused on eight to twelve episode seasons, which has been showing signs of suffering for some time now. We now have the data to show this isn't working as Luminate's data showed that long-running series are some of the shows performing the best. Also, broadcast TV won over streaming and cable with the most watch hours our of the entire bunch. Broadcast TV tends to have the traditional 22-24 episode format.

This is a good exercise to show that it's great to wait for the data instead of listening to talking heads on the internet saying that a show is failing. Yes, it is true that The Acolyte went way over budget which led to its cancellation. It's also true that Disney did not support the show in ways to help it make a profit (more on that here). And now, with this new report, we can see that it beat out all of the competition other than Percy Jackson which is a great show from a beloved franchise.

Hopefully, this will change the minds of people in charge at Disney and give us more of The Acolyte's story in some form. It was very clear the story wasn't done, and now we have facts that people, in fact, watched it.