The Mathematical Case For The Acolyte Being A Waste Of Star Wars Money
The Acolyte has proven to be one of Disney’s most divisive Star Wars shows, and one of the most common criticisms is that the show looks cheap and that the episodes are too short. Honestly, I enjoyed most of the show, but I can’t deny that it does pale in comparison to some of the other Star Wars series on Disney+. For example, I’ve crunched the numbers to reveal a painful truth for fans of the new spinoff: The Acolyte is worse than Andor, spending more money to give us much shorter runtimes, all while looking terrible by comparison.
Let’s Break Down The Runtime
Now, before I can show you the actual conclusions (they’re kind of shocking!), it’s important to discuss how runtime was calculated. For example, each episode of each series has a “previously on” recap that is about a minute long (sometimes a tad more). On top of that, The Acolyte has credits that last for about 5 minutes long and Andor has credits that last for about 5.5 minutes.
To account for this, I have taken the runtimes for each episode of each show and subtracted the recap and credits from them to see how much actual episode runtime we get. When the smoke cleared, The Acolyte had about 281 minutes of actual runtime and Andor had about 504 minutes of actual runtime. Of course, the difference isn’t as stark as it first appears because Andor had 12 episodes and The Acolyte only had 8.
Andor Makes Better Use Of Its Time
However, those numbers alone reveal an interesting truth: the average episode of The Acolyte ran for 35 minutes and the average episode of Andor ran for 42 minutes. For the record, that means The Acolyte episodes were longer on average than some of the haters claimed, but the fact that we had two back-to-back episodes (4 and 5) that were less than 30 minutes after credits and recap made the episodes as a whole feel very short. Andor, by contrast, is (on average) the length of your standard hour-long network show once you subtract the commercials, which made it feel that much longer.
More Money Doesn’t Necessarily Mean More Story
The real zinger here, though, is the respective budget for each show. The Acolyte somewhat infamously had a budget of $180 million, meaning that each episode cost, on average, $22.5 million to make. Andor had a larger budget of $250 million (again, to account for having more episodes), spending an average of $20.8 million per episode.
Obviously, your mileage may vary, but all of this makes The Acolyte (a show that, again for the cheap seats, I kinda liked) seem like Disney wasted some serious money. The studio effectively spent $20.8 million on each 42-minute episode of Andor and $22.5 million for each 35-minute episode of The Acolyte. Simply put, when it came to The Acolyte, the House of Mouse spent more money to give us less story compared to Andor.
Accounting And Aesthetics
On top of that, it’s hard for even The Acolyte’s biggest defenders to claim that the show doesn’t look relatively cheap compared to Andor. Aesthetic judgments are obviously subjective, but these numbers make the adventures of Mae and Osha look that much worse by comparison. Not only did Disney spend more money to make shorter episodes, but those onscreen adventures often looked like a bad Star Wars fan film compared to Andor.
Comparison Is The Thief Of Joy, But We Can’t Overlook This One
Before any fans who have been mainlining Qimir thirst traps on TikTok come for me, I’d like to reiterate that I enjoyed season 1 on the whole and hope we get a season 2, if only to pay off that Darth Plagueis tease. But the numbers don’t lie: Disney paid more to give us less with this show, which is just one reason the fandom is generally more hyped for Andor, a show that also happens to look infinitely better.
At the end of the day, fans frothing at the mouth about changing Ki-Adi-Mundi’s age should be more concerned about some very different numbers. Specifically, the huge budget that Disney seems to be flushing down the drain with The Acolyte.
