The Acolyte has been canceled and there will be no second season. That was hard enough for fans of the series to hear, but now there is panic that Disney might go one step further and pull the entire series from the service, taking some sort of tax write-off like we’ve seen throughout the streaming industry in the past.

There is good news and bad news. But first, why are people worried at all?

This apparently started with fans saying that Disney had removed all official Acolyte items from its store because it was not a subcategory and did not produce search results.

Looking into it further, it’s not clear to me if this is hard evidence. For example, you can’t find Andor items either, and Acolyte products are still sold like toys. However, there are old links to certain items that not only have a sale page, but their listings have disappeared completely and return error pages, which is odd. Still, I’m not even sure if “delete merchandise” is the same as “delete show.” But back to that.

No, Disney cannot delete The Acolyte for a tax write-off. While you may remember Warner Bros doing that with Batgirl and Coyote vs. ACME, that happened before those shows were released. So Disney can’t do that with The Acolyte, a fully released series.

However.

Disney can delete the show to avoid having to pay royalties for the series, and there are already precedents for this on Disney Plus itself. The exact same thing happened with Willow, a show that was barely watched and that Disney simply eliminated. There is now no legal way to watch the show Willow, which infuriated the creators, who knew why they had done it:

“They gave us six months,” said author John Bickerstaff. “Not even once. This business has become absolutely cruel… Before you talk about tax write-offs: These shows have already been released, so they can’t be written off. And in the case of Willow, they own the property outright. The only conclusion is that this is to avoid paying royalties. During a strike.”

What has happened here is that, due to past negotiations with streamers who pay too little royalties for their content compared to the cable era, more places are tempted to simply delete poorly performing shows rather than continue paying royalties that they do not consider worthwhile. And yes, The Acolyte was a poorly viewed show, and it is not impossible that this could This is how the LA Times explained it when it happened to Willow:

“In other words, Disney had to pay the residual costs for ‘Willow’ based on the number of subscribers to the platform, regardless of how many people watched the show. Higher residual costs in the new contract the Writers Guild of America just negotiated will likely accelerate streamers’ decisions to cancel shows.”

This would also be an absolute PR disaster for Disney though. Fans are already complaining that Disney pandered to the “toxic” portion of the fanbase that hated The Acolyte and wanted to get rid of it, but even if the decision to cancel was based more on just cost/viewership, removing it from the service is a whole different matter and raises questions about Disney’s entire Star Wars content branch. And of course, that same crowd would celebrate if the show was actively burned, as they also believe it would erase it from the Star Wars canon. Would that be the case? I don’t even know the answer to that, as the entire concept is just so insane. It’s like burning every copy of a Star Wars novel and wondering if that means its storylines still exist.

I don’t think the merchandise thing is enough evidence that Disney will cancel The Acolyte. But they’ve done it before, and it’s not inconceivable that it could happen again.

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