Cost Of Star Wars Show ‘The Acolyte’ Surges To Quarter Of A Billion Dollars

Disney has revealed that the cost of making Star Wars spinoff The Acolyte surged by 10.5% last year ahead of the release of the controversial show.

The Acolyte debuted in June on the Disney+ streaming platform but had already caused a disturbance in the force by then due to the diversity of its cast.

Set around 100 years before the events of Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace, it sees a former Jedi apprentice reuniting with her master to investigate a series of crimes.

The Hunger Games’ Amandla Stenberg has dual roles as the ex-student Osha and her evil twin Mae, who is trained by Qimir, a character played by Filipino-Canadian actor Manny Jacinto. British model Jodie Turner-Smith stars as the twins’ mother Aniseya who also leads a coven of witches which wants to induct them. Osha escapes their clutches and goes on the hunt for Mae along with two Jedis played by Deadpool & Wolverine’s Dafne Keen and Rebecca Henderson, wife of The Acolyte’s showrunner Leslye Headland.

The diversity of its line-up led to the show being branded woke before it had even debuted which was supposedly the driving force behind its plummeting rating on review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes. Just a day after it launched on June 4 its audience score stood at 50% but then even darker clouds began to gather. Overwhelmingly-negative reviews flooded in leaving The Acolyte with an audience score of just 19% which is lower than the notorious 1978 Star Wars: Holiday Special.

The low score was attributed to unjustified review bombing with the key evidence for this being that the show’s Rotten Tomatoes critics’ score stands at a more respectable 79%. However, Disney’s reaction to the show suggests that there was a more fundamental problem.

Despite the backlash, the stars aligned for The Acolyte at the outset with its first two episodes generating 4.8 million views on launch day, making it the biggest Disney+ series premiere of the year by then according to Deadline.

This earned it seventh place on Nielsen’s Top 10 originals chart in its premiere week with 488 million minutes viewed. It climbed one spot in the second week but then experienced a dramatic fall from grace as it exited the list. The clearest evidence that it wasn’t a commercial success came when Disney scrapped plans for a second season just over a month after the curtain came down on the first one. It proved to be an expensive experiment.

Last year this author revealed that The Acolyte stayed within its set spending levels before filming began but blew its budget after the cameras started rolling. According to Disney’s filings, by September 24, 2023 its costs of $207.8 million (£172.6 million) put it on track to be “over the production budget” even though it was only part of the way through post production.

The cost took the industry by surprise with many outlets wrongly claiming that $180 million was spent on the show. Two experts who got it right were news site That Park Place and entertainment industry pundit Valliant Renegade with the latter also noting that the show’s production costs were likely to soar even higher. This was bang on the money.

The Acolyte was released just over eight months after the date of last year’s filings but the latest set cover that period and the following four months to September 24, 2024. They reveal that $24.2 million (£18.2 million) was spent on the show during those 12 months which is actually quite a modest sum given that the bulk of the visual effects are usually added in post production. There is no doubt about the accuracy of the data.

The Acolyte was made in the United Kingdom which shines a spotlight on its costs. Studios filming in the U.K. get a reimbursement of up to 25.5% of the money they spend in the country provided that at least 10% of their core costs are incurred there.

In order to demonstrate this to the authorities, studios set up separate companies to produce each film in the U.K. and they are obliged to file legally-binding earnings releases. They show everything from the headcount and salaries to the total costs and the level of cash reimbursement.

The companies usually have code names so that they don’t raise attention with fans when filing for permits to film on location. The Acolyte was made by Disney’s subsidiary Blue Stockings (UK) which is believed to be a reference to the show’s leading ladies as the term refers to the educated, intellectual female members of the 18th-century Blue Stockings Society from England led by the hostess and critic Elizabeth Montagu.

The filings are released in stages long after the period they relate to which is why the latest set cover a period which ended precisely a year ago.

They show that the cost of making the series hit a total of £190.8 million which comes to $256.7 million at today’s rates. In contrast, if the conversion is calculated at the date of each set of filings it comes to $230.8 million which is still a staggering sum though a long way off the peak of $645 million (£504.8 million) that Disney spent on two seasons of the Star Wars streaming show Andor.

The $230.8 million is understood to be almost the final total of gross expenditure on The Acolyte with only minimal costs expected in subsequent sets of filings. It gives the show a cost of $46.2 million per hour which is 36 times higher than the $1.4 million (£1 million) minimum hourly spend required to get the reimbursement.

The filings also show that Disney pocketed a total credit of $43.8 million (£36.3 million) for The Acolyte bringing its net spending on it down to $187 million. One of the biggest single expenses was the $30.4 million (£25.2 million) spent on staff with the average monthly employee numbers peaking at 344 in 2023.

However, as this report revealed, in early April 2023, when production was still in full swing, just 30% of the 695 employees were female and across the entire workforce, women’s average hourly pay was 19.4% lower than men’s. It is the height of irony given the role that the diversity on screen played in the curtain coming down on the show.