The Luminate Streaming Charts For The Acolyte Week 3
The new Luminate Streaming Charts were released earlier today on Variety. While we still have to wait about two weeks until Nielsen will finally release their numbers for the premiere of The Acolyte, Luminate releases numbers in a much more timely fashion, these are the charts for the June 13th – June 20th period, which includes the release of last week’s episode. And how did The Acolyte do? Well…
Spoiler!
So, how are the numbers?
According to Luminate The Acolyte was watched for 262 million minutes in the US. This is a decline of 31% compared to the previous week. And good for #7 on the original series charts. The Acolyte is in danger of dropping out of the charts should viewership decline any further, even just slightly, because #10 is Sweet Tooth with 240.2 million minutes. And this is even without House of the Dragon, which Luminate does not include in their charts, since it’s also released on HBO and is not exclusive to Warner’s streaming platform Max. So The Acolyte is actually just the #8 show.
A decline in week 3 for Star Wars shows that released more than one episode in their first week is normal though, the other shows that did that also showed this behavior on the Nielsen charts. Week 2 numbers are boosted by people who watched the previous episodes, but once everyone has caught up numbers decline again.
Ahsokas’s decline was 5.75% though (minimal), Andor’s decline was 26.6% and Obi Wan Kenobi’s decline was 28.8%. So the 31% decline on the Luminate charts is more or less normal, but it would be the biggest drop to date, but we do not know how the Nielsen and Luminate numbers really compare. So we cannot draw any real conclusions here other than The Acolyte viewership dropped significantly, but that this is something which also affected all the other shows that released more than one episode in the first week. But it may well be that The Acolyte’s drop is the highest yet.
I will compare the numbers with other Star Wars Disney+ shows, but the same caveats I mentioned last week still apply. Luminate and Nielsen will not really be comparable 1:1. Different methods, different intervals, so this is just out of curiosity. We will have to wait for Nielsen to finally release their charts to see how different the numbers reported by Nielsen and Luminate are and they will be different because of different methodologies and the different interval (Fri – Thu vs Mon – Sun). So please always keep that in mind!
Since Luminate’s interval only includes two full days for episode 4 (plus Tuesday night), I think it is better to just look at total runtime of all four released episodes and to divide by total minutes watched for the show, which will give us an overall average for the entire series. I would assume the week 3 numbers are greatly impacted by the viewership for episode 3 from the previous week and to give a viewership figure for just episode 4 would probably be pretty inaccurate.
The Acolyte (Luminate): 852.5 million minutes watched – 151 minutes total length – 5.64 million views average
Ahsoka (Nielsen): 1,775 million minutes watched – 170 minutes total length – 10.44 million views average
Andor (Nielsen): 1,465 million minutes watched – 204 minutes total length – 7.18 million views average
Obi-Wan Kenobi (Nielsen): 2,666 million minutes watched – 171 minutes total length – 15.59 million views average
The Book of Boba Fett (Nielsen): 1,419 million minutes watched – 126 minutes total length – 11.26 million views average
The Mandalorian S3 (Nielsen): 2,860 million minutes watched – 133 minutes total length – 21.50 million views average
Now as I said, the numbers are not really comparable, but even if Nielsen reports higher numbers it is very likely The Acolyte is competing with Andor for the title of “least watched Star Wars live action series”. And the exceptional status even for The Mandalorian season 3 is once again highlighted here. Literally nothing on Disney+ comes close to its viewership. So this is the upper bound for what kind of viewership Star Wars shows can have. To then spend so much money, $250 million on Andor, at least $180 million on The Acolyte, with the kind of viewership both shows get seems unwise. If the Luminate figures remotely compare to Nielsen’s then The Acolyte gets about 25% of the viewership of The Mandalorian. In short: 75% of your potential audience said “no” right out of the gate and never even bothered to at least give it a try just based on trailers and the marketing. This should worry Lucasfilm and Disney. A lot.
Also, if we just look at the Luminate data their #1 show is Bridgerton. A show aimed at a female audience that is actually watched by women. Bridgerton has 3.1 BILLION minutes. A Star Wars show, where Star Wars is supposed to be this global entertainment juggernaut, has 8.4% of Bridgerton’s weekly viewership, even if we compare total viewing figures (Netflix releases all episodes at once) The Acolyte may not even get 30% of that.
This for a franchise that – unadjusted for inflation – had the second most successful movie at the domestic box office of all time in 2015 with The Force Awakens. Which sold about 111 million tickets in the US. This is just total box office divided by average ticket price in 2015, however, the actual number will be lower, since most people certainly paid more than $8.43 for their ticket back in 2015, so actual number of tickets sold may be just 70 million or so. So let’s be fair and say the actual number is closer to 70 million tickets sold.
And now barely 5 million watch The Acolyte. Ok, blockbuster movies will always have a bigger audience than tv shows, but still. And when you consider Disney spent as much money on The Acolyte as was spent on the Dune sequel you wonder who greenlights these projects at Disney, why they still look so bad and cheap and why they did not have the money to include CGI Yoda (which was the original plan until they opted for Ki-Adi-Mundi for “budget” and “tech” reasons) and how they justify spending all this money. And how one episode of The Acolyte alone costs more than Godzilla Minus One, in fact, you can get almost two Godzilla Minus Ones for one episode of The Acolyte. If we say The Acolyte will have an average viewership of 6 million people per episode this means Disney spent $30 per viewer to make this show. Does NO ONE at Disney care about ROI anymore? Not even the shareholders?
According to recent statistics Disney+ is about to fall behind tubi in terms of streaming market share in the US, which would make Disney+ only the #6 streaming service. Which emphasizes the major issue of Disney+: people just don’t watch all that many things. They have all these tens of million of subscribers, yet barely ever manage to be represented on the streaming charts. The Acolyte is in fact their biggest original series release in all of 2024 yet (Echo was a pathetic failure). Disney really have to reconsider their content strategy. Inside Out 2 proves that people are more than willing to still watch Disney content. If it’s any good.
Let’s wait for next week and as mentioned in a little less than two weeks Nielsen will finally release their numbers as well. We will know more once they do.
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