The Acolyte just broke a big Disney Plus record

Star Wars: The Acolyte is Disney Plus’s biggest release of the year so far.

4.8 million views on its first day marks out The Acolyte as the biggest Disney Plus launch of 2024 to date.

The annoying part: Disney Plus doesn’t reveal regular stats like Netflix, so we don’t have a benchmark to establish what an achievement this really is for the streamer.

And Disney Plus’s main line live action shows haven’t had any other seasons released this year either. Ahsoka was the last biggie, and was released in August 2023.

It does mean The Acolyte has beaten The Bad Batch season 3, Young Jedi Adventures and Tales of the Empire. Nice work, but you’d hope The Acolyte would eclipse these, right?

Star Wars: The Acolyte was reportedly made with a $180 production budget, averaging out to $22.5 million an episode — even more than the figures reported for Andor and The Mandalorian.

The Acolyte has achieved an excellent Rotten Tomatoes score of 91%. However, this doesn’t highlight the preponderance of only moderately positive reviews around the 3/5 or 6/10 mark, which is the threshold for a “fresh” Rotten Tomatoes review.

On Metacritic, it scores 67%, which is a way below the benchmark established by Andor, with 74%. It’s also just slightly below the 68% of 2023's Ahsoka.

Not checked it out yet? The Acolyte centres around padawan Jecki Lon and her old master Sol, who team up to investigate a dark mystery. But who is the acolyte of the title? That’s Mae, played by Amanda Stenberg. She is the face of the series to a large extent.

Has The Acolyte broken through to turn around the fortunes of Star Wars and superhero content? The current narrative is the public is getting a bit sick of this style of content.

We don’t have enough consistent stats to make any firm conclusions, but signs over at Flixpatrol are not reassuring.

While Star Wars: The Acolyte is the number one Disney Plus show globally, it has already been knocked off the top spot in the US and UK.

Family favourite Bluey commands the number one slot in the US, Grey’s Anatomy in the UK. The latter’s 20th season is currently rolling out.

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