Media Attempts To Spin ‘The Acolyte’ As A Success Based On Nebulous And Undefined Streaming And Engagement Index

July 2, 2024 ·

John F. Trent

Canadian-owned media website ScreenRant attempted to spin The Acolyte as a success based on nebulous metrics from an analytics firm called Reelgood.

The Stranger (Manny Jacinto) in Lucasfilm’s THE ACOLYTE, season one, exclusively on Disney+. ©.

In an article titled “Exclusive Data Suggests The Acolyte Is A Star Wars Success Story Despite The Backlash,” Thomas Bacon claims that “[Reelgood] looked through their data to see how The Acolyte compares to other live-action Disney+ Star Wars TV shows. The results are surprising, and indicate The Acolyte may be a lot more popular than many believe.

A graph showing the various Disney+ Star Wars shows based on release date is shown with each show receiving a unique Streaming and Engagement numerical ranking. The Acolyte has the second highest score with a 6.1 behind Obi-Wan Kenobi, which has a 7.9.

Reelgood’s Streaming and Engagement Index for Disney+’s Star Wars shows

READ: Confirmed: ‘The Acolyte’ Performs Worse Than ‘Ahsoka,’ Global Minutes Viewed Less Than Ahsoka’s U.S. Premiere Viewership

As to how this streaming and engagement metric is determined, Bacon explained, “Reelgood compared the live-action Star Wars Disney+ TV shows, looking at the first 14 days since The Acolyte‘s release. They found that The Acolyte is the second most successful in terms of streaming and engagement, outperforming the average top 100 TV show by a factor of 6. It is only surpassed by Obi-Wan Kenobi, which outperformed the average top 100 TV show by a factor of 8.”

Furthermore, a “Note” on the article states, “Reelgood defines ‘engagement’ as an aggregation of user interactions with titles across Reelgood platforms, including playbacks, tracking, and other interactions.”

If you are unfamiliar with Reelgood, the outlet describes itself as “the most extensive streaming guide in the US and UK, with every TV show and movie available online. Browse through every TV series and movie and sort by title, release year, genre, IMDB rating, and most important -see where to watch it. Then play with a single click or tap.”

According to SimilarWeb, the website generated just above 2 million pageviews in the last 28 days.

READ: Financial Analyst Calls ‘Star Wars: The Acolyte’s’ Global Viewership “Pathetic,” And Explains That Only About 3% Of Disney+ Subscribers Watched

The data flies in the face of other metrics such as The Walt Disney Company’s own global views for the show as well as minutes watched data from analytics firm Luminate.

The Walt Disney Company previously reported The Acolyte only had 11 million global views after a week on Disney+. Given Disney calculates a view as minutes watched divided by total runtime, that brought total minutes watched to around 820 million globally.

Nielsen reported that Ahsoka’s two-episode premiere had 829 million minutes watched just in the United States.

Luminate data also noted that the series only brought in 210 million minutes watched in the United States the week it debuted its first two episodes. This aligns with Disney’s own reporting that The Acolyte only had 11 million global views and having less overall minutes watched than Ahsoka’s US debut.

Luminate further noted that viewership did tick up for the show’s third episode to 380.5 million. However, it has since declined the past two weeks. The week of the fourth episode debuting minutes watched declined to 262 million. The week of the fifth episode declined even further to 232.2 million.

Luminate Streaming Originals: Television Ratings for the week of June 21-June 27, 2024

READ: Weapons And Fight Scene Expert Mocks ‘The Acolyte’s’ Lightsaber Fight Scene: “They’re Not Even Aiming For Each Other”

The viewership data from Luminate is reflected in IMDb user reviews. The first episode had 21,000 reviews. The second declined to 18,000. The third episode bumped back up 20,000. The fourth episode significantly declined to 12,000. And the most recent fifth episode fell to just 9,300 reviews.

Episode reviews for The Acolyte on IMDb

Aside from viewership data, the audience reaction has been overwhelmingly negative. On IMDb, the series currently has a 3.4 out of 10 with a majority of reviews (57.1%) being 1 out of 10.

The Acolyte review scores on IMDb

READ: Leslye Headland Admits ‘The Acolyte’ Season 2 Has Not Been Greenlit Yet: “Who Knows What’s Going To Happen?”

Similarly, on Rotten Tomatoes the show has a 14% rotten Audience Score, the worst score any piece of Star Wars media has received on the site. The average score is a 1.2 out of 5.

Star Wars: The Acolyte Rotten Tomatoes scores

In conclusion, Thomas Bacon and ScreenRant ran to Goodreel in an attempt to spin The Acolyte as a success. The index they shared provides no meaningful data. It does not reveal how they came up with the index. It’s quite possible they just created a bar chart and put a bunch of numbers next to the show and said have at it.