The Acolyte Rotten Tomatoes Score Is The Worst In All Of Star Wars

Most serious critiques of The Acolyte result in opinions ranging from “pretty good,” to—as the kids say—”mid.” The Acolyte‘s abysmal Rotten Tomatoes score, however, isn’t the result of serious critiques. To put it bluntly, the show has been review-bombed to hell.

For those unfamiliar with the term, review-bombing is when a large group of “fans” rush to give a new project a negative review before even watching it. This is how you get such a large discrepancy between The Acolyte‘s critic score on Rotten Tomatoes—84 percent—and its barely double-digit audience score.

Now, obviously, it’s completely acceptable to dislike The Acolyte for legitimate reasons, like the writing and pacing—some of the series’ weaker elements. The problem is that most of these negative reviews aren’t based on legitimate complaints. No, The Acolyte has a Rotten Tomatoes score of only 14 percent because it has a diverse cast and a lesbian couple.

This isn’t even conjecture. Go on X or TikTok and look at the comments beneath any post about The Acolyte. You’ll either be inundated with dog whistles like “DEI” or the “LGBTQ Agenda” or just flat-out racist/homophobic slurs.

If you need more proof that the people responsible for The Acolyte’s score on Rotten Tomatoes aren’t serious, go back to the first paragraph. The Acolyte has the lowest Rotten Tomatoes score of anything Star Wars. Anything. It’s even lower than the score for The Star Wars Holiday Special.

That means the two-hour fever dream in which Chewbacca’s dad, Itchi, watches pornography on a VR headset in his living room is objectively better than The Acolyte. Are we supposed to believe that happened organically? The TV special where one of the Golden Girls sings a song about the last call at the Star Wars cantina has almost double the score of The Acolyte.

Make it make sense!

Star Wars: The Clone Wars—the movie, not the show—has a higher Rotten Tomatoes score than The Acolyte. You know, the movie where Anakin and Ahsoka have to rescue Jabba The Hutt’s baby, Stinky? Yeah, that pile of burning garbage is apparently more popular than The Acolyte.

If that’s still not enough to convince you that The Acolyte was review-bombed on Rotten Tomatoes, we have more proof. It turns out the Fandom Menace gets confused easily. A similarly titled 2008 film, Acolytes, had its audience score drop from 42 percent to 33 percent around the same time the score for The Acolyte took a nosedive.

Coincidence? If it is, it’s a pretty big one. It’s more likely that the trolls were tripping over themselves to give a zero-star rating to the show with the lesbian witches when they accidentally review-bombed the wrong movie. Oopsy!

No one—not even the creators—was expecting The Acolyte to score a perfect 100 percent on Rotten Tomatoes, but 14 percent? Come on. You could have stopped at 42 percent or 38 percent—something more believable. Fans see 14 percent, and they know not to take the score seriously.

Believe it or not, The Acolyte‘s low score on Rotten Tomatoes hurts fans with genuine criticisms of the show. It’s The Last Jedi all over again. The people who hated The Acolyte for the wrong reasons were so loud that the non-racist, non-homophobic critics got drowned out. Now, any criticism of the show is immediately assumed to be in bad faith, regardless of whether it’s a legitimate complaint.

Ultimately, most people who discover that The Acolyte has a Rotten Tomatoes score of only 14 percent aren’t going to assume that the show is bad. They’re going to assume that the fandom is. And sadly, it’s getting harder every day to argue with them.