‘The Acolyte’ Is Well Received by Critics on Rotten Tomatoes, Audience Score Plummets
The first two episodes of The Acolyte are now available on Disney Plus, and the reactions have been pouring in for a couple of days. Critics have given it an overwhelming thumbs up on Rotten Tomatoes, but fans have generally not been as enthusiastic.
As of this posting, the show holds a 93% score with all critics on the site, based on 95 reviews. The average rating sits at 7.6/10. Of the 24 top critics who have submitted their reviews, 71% gave a positive assessment of the show, with the average rating being 6.3/10.
These aren’t extraordinary ratings, but perhaps the most striking numbers come from the audience score. As of the time of posting, there have been over 1,000 people who have submitted their thoughts, with only 33% of them giving it a positive rating. There’s also an interesting imbalance between the scores, with most people giving it between 4-5 stars, or 1-2. The average is at 2.1/5.
There’s obviously a large portion of the fanbase who was always going to review-bomb this show based on its diversity and/or some of the comments made by the creators leading up to it. As pointed out on social media, the show held a 48% audience score at the time of release, which is suspicious in its own right. There were fan screenings right before the show hit Disney Plus, but we’ll assume that people having that experience were, for the most part, not going to give it a one-star rating coming out.
Other accounts who rated The Acolyte have also never rated any other title on the site. Still, reading through the user reviews on the site, a large part of them are at least disguised as rational arguments. The overall score has also went down as more people submitted their ratings after release. And besides that, judging by the reaction from the average viewer over the past couple of days, it seems like the range of opinions is pretty wide, perhaps more so than with Ahsoka or Andor.
We will continue to monitor this evolving situation. At the end of the day, it all comes down to viewership numbers, and though there is a correlation between enjoyment and views, they don’t always go hand-in-hand. We’ll still have to wait a bit more for the Nielsen numbers.
Read our non-spoiler review for the first four episodes here, and our spoiler discussion of the first two, here.
Miguel Fernández is a Spanish student that has movies as his second passion in life. His favorite movie of all time is The Lord of the Rings, but he is also a huge Star Wars fan. However, fantasy movies are not his only cup of tea, as movies from Scorsese, Fincher, Kubrick or Hitchcock have been an obsession for him since he started to understand the language of filmmaking. He is that guy who will watch a black and white movie, just because it is in black and white.
