![Captain Rex (CW24) - Hasbro - The Clone Wars [red] (2009)](/theclonewars/thumbs/tcwr24-CaptainRex1-th.jpg "Captain Rex (CW24) - Hasbro - The Clone Wars [red] (2009)")
The Sad State Of Star Wars On Disney+
Luminate, a Nielsen competitor who have been releasing streaming charts for some time now, released their year end streaming market analysis a while ago and their report – among other things – offers a lot of insight into how Star Wars is doing on Disney+. And in more general terms how Disney+ is doing, at least when it comes to original streaming content.
And for the first time ever we get numbers in this report for shows like Skeleton Crew and even The Bad Batch!
As you probably know Skeleton Crew never made either the Luminate or the Nielsen Streaming Charts. Nielsen have finally released their charts for the week in which the Skeleton Crew series finale was released – and it did not make the top 10 once again, making it the very first Star Wars live action show on Disney+ never to crack the top 10 original series charts.
But how bad was it really? Luminate’s report does include numbers for the first five episodes of Skeleton Crew (all the 2024 episodes) plus numbers for The Bad Batch which released earlier in 2024. And what do you think the #1 original show on Disney+ was in 2024? And how does it compare with the competition?
Star Wars in 2024
First, let’s revisit The Acolyte, the Luminate report includes a chart that plots watchtime for all the episodes across weekdays and we can learn quite a few things from it (note: all figures are US only and not worldwide!):
Click to enlarge! Source: Luminate
So what do we see here? We see that most people actually watch new episodes on the first two days of release, i.e. they do not wait for the weekend to catch up but watch episodes when they are released or soon after. What you can also see is that as the series progresses the initial peak is roughly the same, which, if I had to guess, is probably made up of the most hardcore fans who can’t wait to watch a new episode. But the decline becomes ever more precipitous as the series progresses, meaning viewership falls off more rapidly after day 1 and that almost certainly means The Acolyte lost more and more of the more casual viewers, the ones who do not watch it on release day.
But very telling is the steep decline for the series finale, according to Luminate it lost a lot of viewers. Its peak is not even 1 million views on day 1.
Also, note how low the numbers are, the peak for most Acolyte episodes is just 1.5 million views on release day. This for a high budget series for a once very popular franchise.
Seeing this even the most stalwart Acolyte fans should understand now why Disney axed the show.
But how about Skeleton Crew? Since the show never made the top 10 we have no charts numbers, but fortunately Luminate do include numbers for the first five episodes (those released in 2024) in their report. And the numbers are eye opening!
Click to enlarge! Source: Luminate
Here Luminate compare the performance of Ahsoka, The Acolyte and Skeleton Crew in the first five weeks.
And as you can see the numbers for Skeleton Crew are just woeful. Greatly underperforming even the already lousy The Acolyte figures. The uptick in week 2 is explained by all of these shows releasing more than episode in week 1, in case you wonder. But as Ahsoka gradually gained watchtime, The Acolyte shed viewers as the series progressed and one postive thing, if you want to call it that, is that Skeleton Crew at least had pretty stable, even if extremely low, numbers. Which means the most faithful fans kept watching. A rough estimate is that about 5 million people watched each new episode (in the US). The Mandalorian easily had 25-30 million views per episode. Star Wars lost 80+% of its audience on Disney+ in 2024.
What’s even more shocking, at least for Lucasfilm and Disney probably, is that word of mouth had literally no effect. Most people either liked or even loved Skeleton Crew. Reviews were positive, viewers, most of them, really liked the series and felt it was fun and entertaining and worth your time.
But none of that translates to better viewing figures. The reason for Skeleton Crew’s shockingly low numbers are probably many. Maybe most fans do not want kids as main characters, maybe The Acolyte turned so many people away that they didn’t even bother with Skeleton Crew anymore. What matters is the end result: Skeleton Crew is the worst performing Star Wars live action series on Disney+ ever. With less than 200 million minutes watched for most episodes.
Luminate also have a top 10 of Disney+ original shows. What do you think was the most successful original series on Disney+ in 2024? Spoiler: not anything Star Wars.
Click to enlarge! Source: Luminate
Percy Jackson’s numbers would be a bit higher if Luminate had included the first week of its release.
To put things in perspective: Luminate also have an overall top 10 original series charts for 2024. #1 is Fool Me Once on Netflix with 12.11 billion minutes streamed. The #10 show is Love Is Blind, also on Netflix, with 7.38 billion minutes. Disney’s top performing series, Percy Jackson, only has 25% of the watchtime the #1 show has. If we add the missing episode(s) then maybe 30%.
What is really insightful here is that Luminate also have numbers for older seasons of other shows. Ahsoka slightly outperforms The Mandalorian, to my surprise season 2 of The Mandalorian does not make the top 10, but season 3 and 1 do, despite Luke Skywalker in the season 2 finale. But what this also tells us is that all three seasons of The Mandalorian outperformed brand new Skeleton Crew and had probably almost about as much watchtime across all three seasons as The Acolyte and Agatha All Along. My guess is that season 2’s numbers are in the ballpark of season 1, so total watchtime is maybe 2.1 billion minutes for The Mandalorian across all three seasons in 2024.
An entire season of Echo has worse numbers than any two new episodes of The Mandalorian combined. Echo is by far the worst performing Marvel show on Disney+. Agatha All Along, which some people would love to frame as a “success”, performed even worse than The Acolyte and is yet another failure.
And that five episodes of Skeleton Crew combined merely reach the same total watchtime as one average new episode of The Mandalorian and barely outperforms season 3 of The Mandalorian, which was released in 2023, is just shocking. This tells you how much Star Wars has declined.
The numbers for The Bad Batch are also pretty bad. All 47 episodes combined only have 923 million minutes watchtime. Once again, this is about what one episode of The Mandalorian gets, spread across three entire seasons here. Even if 100% of that was spent watching season 3, which had 15 episodes, that is an average watchtime of just 61.53 million minutes per episode, in reality it will be much less, because a good number of minutes would be spent watching older episodes from previous seasons. No wonder the series was almost certainly prematurely cancelled with a tacked on epilogue to somehow give the show a conclusion.
And what about overall marketshare when it comes to original content?
Click to enlarge! Source: Luminate
Much smaller Apple TV+ and Paramount+ outperform their much bigger rival Disney+. But all of them cannot keep up with Netflix which is just dominating the original content market. Of course the numbers here are impacted by the number of original shows and how many of them any streaming service will produce.
But it is easy to see why it will be prudent of Disney to scale down production of original shows even more, they literally do almost noting for the service and it’s their archival content or things like Bluey that get people to subscribe to the service.
So what can we say?
Star Wars is in a deep crisis. The shows, overly expensive with inflated budgets, have failed on Disney+ in 2024. The merchandise is failing, which was confirmed by Hasbro in their last two earnings reports. The video game greatly underperformed and was a massive flop for Ubisoft. Nothing with a Star Wars label on it enjoyed any success in 2024.
So the question about future plans for the franchise becomes ever more important. Maybe the Mandalorian movie seemed like a good bet at the time, when it is easily their most successful new character with “Baby Yoda” even becoming a pop culture phenomenon for a while. But that was 2019 and 2020. Then season 3 happened. And the movie follows three long years later. In the meantime Leslye Headland burned down the house with The Acolyte. I still think Lucasfilm is vastly underestimating the negative impact of this hateful, toxic show by a narcissistic showrunner who made the series all about herself and her family issues.
Andor returns to Disney+ in April. It will be interesting to see how it will perform. Will it improve on season 1’s numbers? If so, then maybe things can turn around. If the numbers are even worse then all alarm bells should ring over at Disney. Because then there is a real chance that the franchise may actually end due to lack of general interest.
What else: the Luminate report has many more interesting charts, they look at many more things. Of note is how badly Rings of Power season 2 performed for Amazon. While season 3 was just greenlit recently, chances are if season 3 does not turn the ship around that it may be the last. Because season 2 lost 60% of the viewership.
Nielsen have also released their 2024 charts, but unlike Luminate they also include licensed content. And here things are a lot more positive for Disney. Bluey was the most watched streaming show in 2024 with 55.62 billion minutes streamed. As suspected many people apparently subscribe to Disney+ for their kids.
The most watched movie is also on Disney+, evergreen Moana reached 13.03 billion minutes. Once again underlining the fact that most people get Disney+ for their archive and Bluey and for their kid centric content, not any of the originals for the more adult market. That Moana outperformed any of the other newly released movies on Disney+, like Inside Out 2, is telling.
One thing you learn from Nielsen is that legacy content vastly outperforms new original shows. None of the overall top 10 streaming shows are streaming originals, all of them are either licensed or old shows like Bluey, Grey’s Anatomy, Family Guy, Big Bang Theory or NCIS.
So it’s not all doom and gloom for Disney+. People love their animated content. Bluey is a runaway success. Just not any of their originals. But it is certainly doom and gloom for Star Wars (and also for Marvel on Disney+, quite frankly). Now the only question is if they can somehow turn the ship around or if Star Wars series will come to an end because everyone tuned out. Reports say various shows are in development. But that means nothing. I believe a lot will hinge on the performance of the Mandalorian & Grogu movie and possibly Ahsoka season 2 in 2026. And if you add Hasbro’s recent remarks regarding Star Wars I also believe the future of the Hasbro toy license will depend on the success of the 2026 content.
I am convinced that Star Wars needs a reset. Not just for the movies and shows. But especially at Lucasfilm where basically everyone in charge who is responsible for this mess needs to be replaced. Including Dave Filoni, he is very much part of the problem. It’s not just Kathleen Kennedy who really needs to retire. Now. She has mismanaged Star Wars for long enough now. Her insane plan to make a Rey movie would probably be the final nail in the coffin. This needs to stop now, before it is really too late. Star Wars is on life support. And it’s not guaranteed the Mandalorian can save the franchise all over again like he did in 2019/20.
 |
|
|
Related Links
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
-Click HERE to return to the home page-
![Sith Trooper (Holiday Edition) - TBS [P4] - Six Inch Figures (Exclusive)](/galleries/2020/Review_SithTrooperHolidayEditionTBS6P4/thumbnails/Review_SithTrooperHolidayEditionTBS6P4013.jpg "Sith Trooper (Holiday Edition) - TBS [P4] - Six Inch Figures (Exclusive)")
Toy Reviews