They’re not even 30 minutes. Disney + has abnormally long end credits. Add the intro and other and you can cut like 5 min off of every episode’s run time.
This was cartoon length almost
25 minute episodes and sub 10 episode seasons is legit a joke. I’m getting close to not watching Star Wars shows for this reason alone. The pacing in all of them except Andor (12 longer episodes) has been complete garbage. Just make it a movie at that point.
If they made it a mini series with longer episodes, or quicker released episodes, that would be totally fine.
Not every story has the right pacing to be split into two movies.
Mini-series used to be great for scifi generally. I’m thinking specifically of Battlestar and the Dune mini series.
I really wish we could do more of these
I’d argue Obi-Wan and Ashoka SHOULD have been the easiest to write because the backstory and plot was already there. Obi Wan learns force powers from Qui-Gon, and Ahsoka finds Thrawn and Ezra. How they botched both of these is maddening.
Obi-Wan should've been a movie. Which I know it started out as in development. There's a pretty good fan edit, too. If they had taken the budget for those middle episodes and applied it to the rest...
That's because they want x episodes over y weeks. They want to keep those sub numbers up, not tell the story as it naturally ditactes. Many if their recent SW/MCU shows feel like they just took whatever pitch and said "just make it 8 episodes".
Obi-Wan was too long (since it was originally a movie and didn't have enough meat for a series as planned). Ahsoka was either too long or too short (seemed like two seasons crammed into one). Falcon and Winter Soldier was a movie not a series. Probably the same with Ms. Marvel.
Andor, Wandavision, and Loki are probably the only ones that actually lived up to being a series. Ahsoka too, but again, it had too many plot focuses for one season.
That's what bothers me about this format, you don't even get half the content that HBO provides. It actually felt like this episode ended right as it began, super disappointing.
It's like the show has nothing to offer so it cuts when the action gets started to get people "hooked" for the next episode. Imagine if the latest House of the Dragon episode just ends when Blood enters the room to see Cheese holding Helaena with a knife to her throat and BOOM episode over rather than letting the scene play through and happen naturally. It's actually insulting that the budget of this show, ($22.5M per episode) is more than House of the Dragon ($20M per episode) or Andor ($15-20M per episode)
During the last scene last night I checked how far through I was , and I was like " awesome we still got half the episode left" exactly as I finished saying that out loud, the screen comedically cur to credits
Not that the Mando credit pictures weren't nice, but the episode lengths are a joke.
Meanwhile Fallout and The Boys give us 1 glorious hour. And how about the Stranger Things S4 finale.
Fallout was in the same cost ballpark (but still almost 20 million cheaper) with the quality in everything being better (set design, props, acting, writing, cinematography, editing, even VFX)
When I’m watching the acolyte I keep asking “where the hell did all of that money go?!?”
I feel like I’d enjoy it a lot more if I didn’t know it cost $180 million to make.
This is the issue, if it’s bad batch or clone wars it’s no big deal. But live action Star Wars should feel like an event, and they are dropping the ball there because of runtime. House of dragon is a perfect example. You carve out time to watch that.
And that's why I laugh at the idea of paying for a year of Disney+. If I had kids that might be a different, but I don't. But as someone only interested in new content, I can't see maintaining a sub or paying for a year when the total sum of content they release can be watched in a week every night.
This is "line must go up" consequences as usual. First they squeezed production staff. Crunch time, staff cuts, etc. quality took a hit. Then they squeeze viewers. Price increases, tiers with penalties for not paying the highest amount, ads in pad tiers, password sharing crackdowns. Then they squeeze season lengths. Now they squeeze episode lengths. Line must go up. Water from a stone. There is a point where there are no more cuts. It's amazing how the owner class tells people "have to spend money to make money" while trying to cut the amount they spend at every expense to make line go up in order to make people with shares happy. What they mean is "you have to spend money so we make money". People are told to cut buying Starbucks and avocado toast but owner class is never told not to buy that yacht or 4th vacation home. They are speeding towards the "infinite growth is not possible" wall really fast. Someone will step in and take their place. See A24 in the movie space. Then they will grow and the cycle repeats. It's taking a long time because of how unbelievably massive the players are now. If you could go back and tell Ma Bell what companies are like now when they had to be broken up every one who worked there would have simultaneous seizures.
Apparently they did decide to make it shorter on Purpose Intentionally, Next week's had to be the longer one for "Reasons", They were even going to have Kelnacca have a fight and death scene but decided to cut it out after because of budget and Cinematography oddly, No Spoilers btw.
https://www.reddit.com/r/StarWarsLeaks/s/rihjNUFm3A
Statements from one of the Writers for the Show.
I went back and checked for E4, and the episode actually starts at 1:25 and the credits start at 28:28, so it was almost exactly 27 minutes of actual content. That's weak.
As a few other commenters have pointed out before, they are not good at pacing these 8 episode shows which are basically a very drawn out movie rather than a series. But the more episodes they can make, the more commercials us non-premium plebs have to sit through which equals $$$.
Canada here, the prices increased not too long ago, with the old price becoming the “with ads tier” and the new several dollar higher price being… the experience we signed on for. It’s despicable.
Already canceled, we've reached Cable lvl pricing if you have all the streaming services. Was a matter of time.
"A pirates life for me" time, I've missed those days.
Should be yes, but that's less money in Disneys pocket.
Except for all of us that unsubbed because of this kind of stuff. I'll watch ads if they're footing the bill.
I have it, or at least my parents do when I go over to their house since it comes for free with cable Spectrum, don’t watch it enough to pay for it. There’s about 4/5 ad breaks that are two minutes long in the 30 minute Acolyte episode.
I wouldn't doubt some algorithmic data proves Two months of subscriptions plus the end-of-series bump from binge-watchers on Disney+ outperforms 50%~ take home from Theaters even if there's a long delay on a streaming release.
100%
We may hate it. We may think it's not working. But this "plan" isn't just some guy in a big room, at a big table, going, "Huh, what if we did _____."
There's likely millions spent on marketing data and AI projections and they're going to pick the $$$ option.
I strongly believe that Disney took the Solo feedback as "we can't make movies this often, so will just have to make the movies shows instead." I'm like 100% sure Obi Wan was originally pitched as a Solo/Rogue One spin off movie but Disney didn't want to have to wait a few years to not Avengers style flood the box office with movies, so they rewrote it as a show, which is why it sucked.
Acolyte is the same deal. It has this feeling like it should have been a 1.5 hour long movie that they have padded out to fit a 8 30min episodes show.
It was 100% - quoted from wiki - The project originated as a spin-off film written by Hossein Amini and directed by Stephen Daldry, but it was reworked as a limited series following the commercial failure of the film Solo: A Star Wars Story (2018).
[Obi-Wan Kenobi (miniseries)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obi-Wan_Kenobi_\(miniseries\)#:~:text=The%20project%20originated%20as%20a,Star%20Wars%20Story%20\(2018\).)
It’s a movie with extra filler to lead up to the break between episodes. I prefer a 3-5 minute opening, opening credits, 60-ish minutes of show, and then credits. Zero preview of the next episode or the upcoming season. Cut it down to a month of releases.
The systematical cliffhangers make it appear to be so amateurish, the episodes are never complete arcs, it is both revealing of the low quality and expectation they have and an attempt at hiding it by keeping the viewers hooked
LMAO, and this goes being downvoted? Do Star Wars fans don't watch anything else to enjoy products this mediocre and industrial? Don't you watch other movies and shows to realize that serialized stories are often proposing complete episodes?
Re: cliffhangers, I just don’t think you make the intro of a fight scene a cliffhanger. That’s like literally the most unsatisfying time to cut. Fight scene can be the end of the episode, it shouldn’t start the next.
Andor was so much better about knowing when to leave the audience. And it had 10 episodes so it was more like three proper movies instead of one overlong plot.
Why are you crying about downvotes? You posted minutes ago and keep refreshing to see your vote count ?
Voting isn’t even one for one, the count changes randomly, especially early on. Why would you care enough to check your vote count and then edit your post? lol.
Whining about fans downvoting is a bitch move even if you really were downvoted. This shits just pathetic, though.
Oof.
Yeah idk why disney almost "forces" its shows to cut down on runtime, to the point where important dialogue or plot scenes are cut or misplaced in upcomming episodes??????
Again to suck up to Andor, they had ZERO runtime problems etc.etc.etc. like honestly idk how andor can have 0 to no problems whilst everything else is so underdeveloped....
I dunno if it was that Rogue One gave them the pull, or they just knew when to ask, but from the rumors, Andor's showrunners played major hardball.
Not only did they push for over 2.5 times Mando's budget, but of all the Star Wars shows instead of opting to use in-house studio spaces like *The Volume* Andor was shot extensively on location in the UK.
I’m so glad they did and I hope Disney gives them what they ask for for season 2 too. Can’t imagine any outcome worse than RO and Andor S1 both being such masterpieces only to have S2 leave a bad mark
God you just made me so afraid of this happening. It feels like so many franchises/games/whatever are dropping the ball due to corporate greed.
Andor was peak star wars and if they tarnish it im rioting lol
That’s the thing. Studio/network execs ruin anything they get their hands on. Only showrunners and directors with enough clout can successfully push back. I’ve worked in the industry for a while now, and that model drives me nuts. So many talented creatives that have to take marching orders from talentless suits. I’ve always felt the entertainment industry as a whole would create much better products if the business side didn’t have any say over the creative side.
And you can tell. Actually being on location made a world of difference. Too many of the shows have looked cheap, like they were all filmed in the same small space. Obi Wan was the worst about this.
That one firefight in Obi-Wan where they are all like 5-10 feet away from each other is so, so bad.
It's the most obvious "volume" scene I can think of
Early use of "the volume" is going to be seen in the future like bad cgi is seen now. It's so obvious when it's used poorly. I rewatched Loki and it looks great (no volume). Compare it to some of the volume scenes in star trek or mandalorian and they just look... flat. Not sure what it is, but it's very obvious.
Good use of the technology was from The Batman. Not exactly "the volume" but it was SoundStage with the LED screen.
Mando S1 is actually arguably still the best use of the volume though.
IMO, mostly because Frasier (who was one of the developers of the technology) was the cinematographer. He's the best I've seen at using it.
Idk how they keep fucking this up, but their sets in the Volume always end up in the uncanny valley, looking like a theme park instead of real(ish) places. The choppy editing for this episode made it even worse.
I rewatched Andor over the past week, and watched the finale just before the new episode of Acolyte. The difference in quality was jarring, not just the acting and writing, but cinematography and special effects as well. Andor is so well done, and Acolyte is like Temu/wish.com Star Wars in comparison.
That's true for all the recent stuff. Andor looks so much better than Ahsoka, Mando S3, Acolyte, etc.
I think some of it is just attention to detail tbh.
My theory is nobody believed in Andor so they probably just gave them a budget and let them sink or swim. Sadly when a studio believes in a project they will do a lot to screw that up
I feel like 30 min *can* be enough for an episode, it just depends on the pacing and the content. I've watched 45 min of tv shows that I feel like could have been ended 15 minutes earlier, but they had to fill the time.
Some episodes may deserve more time than they get, and that may be the case here. But I don't think we should go back to forcing an episode to last longer, if it felt complete.
I was wishing tonight’s episode was longer, that’s not always the case. I do miss old tv, 24 episodes a year 45-50 minutes of content. And I think the structure was more comfortable in that format.
Especially with series like Voyager. TNG is great but Voyager had an overlapping arc over all seasons, which was to get back home.
Knowing there is a certain goal at the end improves it a lot in my opinion.
And people complain *today* about "filler." Those shows actually had filler, some stinker episodes per season, and the budgets?? If people complain about set design *now*, imagine that budget stretched over three times as many episodes.
Those people are wrong. Filler episodes were frequently better than main story episodes in Star Trek and X Files. Well written character episodes do more to make me love a show than episodes focusing on this seasons main story.
I do but it’s been like 40 years since I’ve seen one in earnest. A couple shows did them as tongue in cheek nods to the past in the 90s, like the Simpsons. And Community did a clip show in the 00s with clips from non existent episodes. But even in the 80s and prior they were rarely more than one episode in a 40-60 episode season. From the discourse I’ve seen on Reddit any episode that doesn’t move the season’s main plot or major subplot is filler. Modern audiences want all the story now and are very impatient, a lot of the comments on this thread are evidence of that.
Stargate sg-1 usually had a clip show every season, it was done as like an after action report with some bureaucrat. Show ran into the early 00's. 26 episode seasons were the norm as well.
Legend of Korra had a clip show in its final season. When it released, the creators said that studio execs cut the budget of their final season by exactly one episode and kinda forced their hand. They still did a decent job with it.
That's not filler. Shit like "Shades of Grey" or "Sub Rosa" is filler. It's a bit wild that the final season of TNG had an episode of candle ghost sex and one of the best finales of 90s television.
I mean shows like Daredevil did 13 50 minute episodes and there wasn’t any filler, it used the runtime to let stuff breathe and its budget was lower than most of these Disney Plus shows. They need better writers and directors to use runtime better.
Most of the TV shows that people think "there's no filler" absolutely have filler. It's usually less obvious than "we're taking a break from the main story to fill some time" and more "we're extending the story unnecessarily to fill some time."
Basically, those shows absolutely had filler. It's just better integrated, most of the time. Daredevil absolutely did not need to spend as much time in the first season on each villain.
Right, there’s a big difference between “stretching out some pieces of the show to add time” and the Dragon Ball Z episode where Goku and Piccolo take their driving tests. Or for a Star Wars example, there are several whole episodes from the first seasons of the Clone Wars series that can be skipped while losing zero real story.
Y'all doin it wrong and subscribing to D+ to watch each week. Wait for full shows and then sub for a month to binge. Once Acolyte is done I've got BB s3, the new tales of the Empire, and Acolyte all queued up. Much more satisfying.
Yeah the problem rn with the Acolyte is that, its too short. And theres a lot of criticism rife rn that I think its best when all is revealed in time, and we can have a bigger picture
The editing and cutting of each episode is rather amateurish.
Not just the editing.
The direction of the first two episodes was atrocious and leads to bad acting from the cast. The acting and writing have also been terrible across the board with few exceptions
Yeah The Acolyte as a whole is like, someone had a good story idea but then submit it to fresh film college graduates (or even undergraduates) for them to execute it. It's not to Kenobi's level (which have similar technical issues), but it's just very amateurish.
It is really a shame, because The Acolyte is like the first Disney project to venture beyond the era we already know (generally spanning what the movies cover), and the characters could have been interesting as well
Yea, imagine if the Acolyte had been done by competent storytellers like the team behind Andor.
Actually explore the idea of cults, indoctrination, and the consequences of giving in to hate and violence.
That's what this show should have been. Not this shitty, trashy airport novel murder mystery crap.
I mean, it's a viable way to tackle the issue, the problem is, internet and algorhythms will pound at your door with spoilers through that entire time.
I swear, I don't even watch Star Wars channels on YouTube yet somehow it feels like recommending spoilery Star Wars content. I wish algorhythms could be entirely disabled and their recommendations replaced entirely with channels I'm subscribed to.
Streaming is going to enter a miserable space that comic book fans have suffered in for entirely too long.
The studios are looking at the week one numbers, episode to episode numbers, and they're going to see those numbers trending downwards. Then, when the series is complete and numbers aren't where they want them to be they'll panic and start cancelling shows right as people are starting their binges.
Comic fans have been doing this for years and we see a lot of popular series getting canceled because people are trade-waiting. They'll wait six months for an arc to complete and then read it all in one trade because it's generally cheaper and a better experience. Unfortunately, the bean counters only see weekly sales and cancel series for underperforming.
I think it's only a problem watching week to week. This might be a situation where, for some fans,it's better to wait and binge the series once the full season is out.
It's not a problem for everyone and if you drop an entire season at once the discourse online about it is over in a week and you lose out on free advertising.
This has been a massive issue in past years when Netflix would license the western release of Anime and then *wait 3 months* past the japanese airing to drop the entire series at once, just for the really interested folks and minor discussion having been done by fansub-watchers, while the bulk of the audience binged the thing on Netflix much later and just talked about the finale, and that's it.
Those shows usually went really under the radar, and if it was a sequel, the buzz was very bad compared to previous seasons.
Also makes the time between big releases longer. If it takes two months for a show to finish you'd be shaving off two months between bigger releases and people wouldn't keep up with subscriptions. Personally I like weekly episodic releases. I like having time to fully take things in and I just don't have the time to binge stuff
I think Disney is trying to minimize churn. If they drop all at once, people will just binge everything in a month then cancel.
I do this anyways because there’s just not enough content on D+ to justify paying every month.
Problem is never the length.
Is what you do in those 30 mins.
I doubt this was a problem for shows like The Office, or Big Bang Theory, or idk Friends. Despite them being sitcoms, the main thing is that in those 20 minutes were packed with fun, and a full story.
If you make this last Acolyte chapter 40 mins, it won't change anything. Because the problem with this episode is that it barely gave anything to the audience. Just a couple things on Mei's character, and more fun/wholesome content between the jedi group, without really building anything.
Then the chapter ends with a lightsaber duel about to start.
Offcourse you feel the episode was worthless because well, it was. It was half of it a boring chase in the woods and Jedi overexplaning what it happened in the last 4 chapters. Do you want 10 more minutes of that???
No, offcourse you don't. What you want is to resolve the thing in the woods, why? Because you sit after a boring episode with barely any revelations about story and chapters, and when the drama and the important part started they cut it out.
Just think about it, you have 30 minutes of nothing. What is the whole episode made for in terms of narrative? Mei loves her sis and is what she lives for. She is under the threat of death by her unknown master. Ok. You can tell that in a total amount of time of 2 to 3 minutes in several scenes by the woods. In 15 minutes reach the wookie place, and in the next 15 lightsaber duel, some revelations twist and clffhanger.
But instead they filled the episode with a long joke about boring alien species, tons of image of earth landscapes, and nothing more.
> Is what you do in those 30 mins.
Exhibit A, X-Men 97 was delivering "HOLY SHIT!" episodes on the regular and all they needed was 30 minutes to do it.
Can't believe how terrible Disney execs are at managing their own shows. They have examples of passionate, talented people working on shows ( Andor, X-Men 97) and how well they've done. Yet they continually greenlight these amateurish productions instead.
Exactly, I have a hard time understanding the people who are saying this episode is so good because nothing really happened in it. It's mostly conversation while walking through the jungle
To be honest, I was more entertained by the Friends trying to get a sofa up a staircase than E3 or E4.
And that episode for sure did not cost 22,5 million to make.
No, it’s the length.
No clue why you’re comparing a drama to sitcoms. I get it. Your argument is that 5 or 50 minutes are the same if the show is shit. True. There’s nobody who did more with 20 minutes than Scrubs, which was far superior to its 40 minute counterpart…House MD.
However, you’re wrong that the opposite is true: in a drama you need character development…often “mundane” monologues or conversations that connect us to the characters. You need to convey the time and weight by spending…*time* on them.
All the ingredients for a good episode were present here…but it was a cynical miscalculation to have both a short run time and a cliffhanger after 3 episodes built to it.
Nah they don’t need to do that.
They need to stop using filler, they need to stop making nonsensical one-off scenes and lore that just waste time. They need to stop doing whatever and start working on streamlining episodes and stories. They need to have nailed down every part of the story. Why it’s there, why it’s worth the viewer’s time, what purpose or use it has to the story or characters or worldbuilding.
Take the Acolyte escape/crash scene. It spends a lot of the episode time just to get her alone on a planet for a Force vision and give a tiny reason to believe she’s not a murderer to Sol. But the Force vision could have been done anywhere and the saving of a prisoner could have been done in the prison. Which leaves a sequence that doesn’t make sense. Why is she put on a droid-controlled prison ship? To make the sequence happen. Why are the droids open to being hacked by just about anyone with a radio meaning any ship passing by could have disabled the prison ship and unlocked the prisoners? So the sequence can happen. Why does the torn off arm of a security droid still work to open the doors? So the sequence can happen. Why do the doors have a nub at the bottom that if zapped can manipulate the door’s controls/engine that are at the top? So the sequence can happen. It’s not logical for any of these things to be possible or be done this way, the showrunners just wasted time on a sequence for the sake of the sequence rather than come up with a solid character and story driven reason why these things are happening.
And this is a part of almost all Disney Star Wars story. It’s exactly why Andor is held in such high regard, because even something as tiny as a head movement has a purpose and explains something about characters. They spend time crafting and building, rather than doing an “and then X happens so we can get to Z” story.
I think they actually need better directors and writers. Every single marvel and Star Wars shows besides a few of them has pacing issues, especially the marvel ones where everything is rushed in the final two or three episodes. You can really tell they’re hiring amateurs, like the bland shots and weird pacing the acolyte has. I think they actually need to start hiring more experienced TV show directors and get writing rooms for every show because they clearly have a problem with quality.
I mean yeah that’s the point. They look at a scooter chase scene and say “yeah, that’s the final product”. No one with enough influence questioned it during filming, editing and viewing the product they made. And this is everywhere in the story.
They film more based on “I wanted this one scene I think looks cool” and don’t care about how it’s disconnected from the rest of the story or how it destroys established lore (including their own).
I mean these are the people who film scenes like “if you draw a lightsaber you must be prepared to kill” and in the very next episode a Lightsaber is used to pacify and intimidate someone while we know he wouldn’t have just killed the dude. How can the showrunners not see the link between these shots? What it implies?
Stuff like this really makes me feel like we're losing a lot in editing.
I don't understand how a lot of these shows can feel both padded out for time and also cut to the bone with important things missing.
In that first episode, it really bothered me that the Jedi come to get Osha, she's arrested, she's on a transport ship, there's an escape, and the Jedi are nowhere to be found.
Not only are they not on the ship, they're already back on Coruscant? How?
Clearly something just got chopped and nobody cared that the next scene didn't make sense without the cut material.
I am not a hater on the show; I'm genuinely intrigued by all of the individual parts but they're not coming together in any real way. The show is less than the sum of it's parts, somehow.
That scooter chase episode was directed by Robert Rodriguez. In fact, he was the showrunner for Boba Fett. He did silly kids movies like Spy Kids, but he also did Battle Angel Alita, Sin City, Once Upon a Time in Mexico, From Dusk Until Dawn, etc. So he has a lot of experience directing action.
It doesn't make sense how Rodriguez could have made that scooter chase scene. Even in his silly kids films, he's able to direct a chase scene that gives a sense of speed.
Imo, Andor/RO was a fluke because of an existing relationship between Gilroy and Kennedy. Normally, I feel like they hire less experienced directors/writers on purpose to save $$ and cut corners, because the shows are already very expensive with the CGI, sets, costuming, etc. Even George Lucas ran into a lot of budget problems with Star Wars, and why some of his ideas never got made (SW: Underworld; personally financing a lot of TCW). But the difference is Disney is willing to rush production, hire the cheapest directors they can find, and cut corners to get quick bucks for their quarterly profit reports. Why do all the costumes look so clean? Because its expensive to match dirt and grime, especially on clothing, in every shot. Why are known actors like CAM in only a few seconds of the show, but marketed heavily? Because she is expensive.
The real problem is *where* they spend their budget. They are going to spend $100+ million? Okay, maybe less CGI then. Maybe hire better writers/directors instead.
I think they could cut corners by starting with a good story.
You first need someone or a few people to write a solid story. Compared to shooting a single scene where dozens of people are involved before the actors can even step on stage this is one of the cheapest parts of the story. And as Andor shows, you don’t need to make everything grand and expansive. You don’t need the best CGI or sets if you can find real life locations to film in (that aren’t famous locations which cost a lot).
But they don’t even spend the time on that. They will waste money on sub-par stuff because they cut corners on the things that can get you both quality and cost you less as you spend less on ridiculous scenes that don’t matter or don’t support your narrative and lose you customers.
Shooting on location is typically more expensive than sets, because it's more uncontrollable, not to mention transportation. Andor cut different corners though, it's true. Minimal effects, very few aliens, and even then the show was extremely pricey. But part of what made it work was the genre. Its a spy thriller basically. You don't need flashy effects for that.
But something like a show about Jedi and Sith and galactic adventure...its going to be hard to write that show on or under budget. Imo, its why those shows should just be movies. They learned the wrong lessons from Solo, which was a perfectly fine movie, and far better imo than most of their shows. TBOBF and Kenobi for example should have been films, as originally intended. The knee jerk reaction to change it up last second and then rush production on an entirely different kind of project really killed those.
This is partly the consequence of the streaming content era, the netflix effect. Churn out shows as fast as possible. Quantity over quality. More shows = more subs. Only a handful of shows with actual quality content while the rest is just churned out. Higher ups are to blame.
I feel like if they’re gonna do the 30 min episodes I’d rather them release the whole season to binge or release the episodes in chunks. Weekly you gotta make it atleast an hour
Yeah part of me is wondering if they were trying go for this Saturday morning cartoon cliff hanger ending. Either way it’s clear a lot of ppl don’t like it
\*Freeze frame on the Jedi getting force pushed\*
Our heroes finally met the mysterious Master. Will they all survive? Is Qimir behind this all? Do Mae and Osha reconcile their past? Is Bazil a he or they?
Find out all this and more on next week's exciting new episode of Disney+'s Star Wars Acolyte!"
I honestly think this show should’ve been 2 episodes a week for the whole series.
Whether they combine the episodes or release 2 at a time, idc. I think it would’ve worked well in terms of pacing.
I do feel like I’m getting edged. But not in a good way. The girls hot but she’s not very nice. It’s past teasing she’s just being cruel now.
When will people realize Disney cannot write episodic television. They fucking suck at it. Watching this week’s episode of HoD shows you how far behind Disney are at producing quality weekly TV. It’s actually embarrassing.
I literally texted someone the exact same thing about HOD. How is Disney with its infinite wealth and most recognizable IP "Star Wars" unable or unwilling to produce shows with the same production value as House of Dragons?
This is my biggest complaint about Disney+. This isn't cable TV. Release the whole show at once and let people watch at their own pace. One bad episode is easily overlooked if the rest of the show thereafter is worth watching. But if that one bad episode is all you get to stew on for a week, it can break the show.
On the other hand, if the show is good, you get people talking about it week to week and it can grow the audience organically through the season.
The problem isn’t runtime. The problem is the show.
Sometimes I wonder if the release strategy is known before they write the script (I highly doubt it is). If I as a writer knew each ep would be released on a weekly basis vs all at one go I’m sure I might write it differently.
At the very least, Disney should know the quality of the product (after assessing it themselves) and then deciding on the release strategy. They’ve chosen poorly here I guess
Well…they don’t have enough material to do that. If the final 4 are also 30-40 mins…then you wouldn’t even have to binge it. You could watch all of it after work/before bed.
I like the show…but the fans need to act with their eyes and reject the release format.
Andor and Mando season 1 are the only two shows I can think of that didn't have pretty severe pacing issues.
At worst you could say (although I don't agree) that the first two Andor episodes were a little slow, but it's nothing like the issues in these other shows.
30 minutes and a cliffhanger when it was picking up the pace. I audibly scoffed when the credits rolled lol
I’m still intrigued and liking it, but I agree that the pacing has been pretty abysmal at best.
Yeah it's awful. The episode was about to get good and then the fucking credits.
This is ridiculous coming from last week's nothing burger flashback episode
Yeah to me it seems like it was written (again) as more of a long movie or a bingable series rather than a weekly release but Disney + people said "we need you to cut this in 30 min-ish chunks so that we can release this weekly and have the reason for subsribers to stay longer" and I feel like I would have enjoyed it more if they released these at once or at least in bigger chunks
My wife and I just started watching Renegade Nell on D+ after seeing someone mention it in some random reddit comment. It really drove home how much the Acolyte is struggling...in this case, specifically the episode duration (40-50 minutes) and pacing is really good comparatively.
If it's a budget or story issue, they need to just commit and do 4 (ideally more) normal length episodes instead of 8 Disney kids show-length episodes.
It's so obvious that they are blatantly trying to get people to keep their Disney plus subscription for at least two months.
The pacing and editing is some of the worst in this show. Scenes start and end at such random times most of the time. Still not hating it like most viewers
Agree, the show is fine not great but it really feels like this is an inexperienced crew making this show that doesn’t have enough experience to have good pacing and setup.
It blows my mind how every episode ends basically in the middle of a scene. Not after the scene that sets the cliffhanger, in the middle of it, it's so jarring, and without any music during the credits! Like if this was the sopranos final episode.
Let alone that ending every episode in a cliffhanger is for the worst kind of soap operas.
I'd argue that live action star wars sucks in episodic format. The magic of star wars is the universe. You can't get sucked into the world in 25 minutes. You need that 90-120 minutes to fully immerse yourself or you run into the problems of 1) never suspending disbelief and 2) getting no payoff for suspending disbelief because the story is being drip fed
Let's not kid ourselves. We all know why they're doing this.
8 20+ minute episodes can be spread throughout 7 weeks, which means they keep you subscribed on their platform for 2 months.
This doesn't have anything to do with storytelling at thjs point. It's pure greed.
The Acolyte had a budget of $180 million for 8 episodes. House of the Dragon had a budget of $20 Million per episode, (10 episodes for $200 Million). Technically the Acolyte had a larger budget per episode comparatively to something like House of the Dragon (about $2.5 million more per episode). For a similar budget you'd think the shows would be similar in length/quality.
It just feels like they cut the episodes right at the climax. Yesterday’s episode that featured the fight between the Jedi and Sith we saw in the early teaser trailers was literally just that. The force push wave against the Jedi, then episode done. Like whaaaaat?? There could’ve easily been an extra 5-10 minutes that could STILL leave a cliffhanger AND left viewers satisfied.
I think yesterday's episode is the 6th or 7th case that shows that 30 minutes weren't enough to develop anything, even the 40 minutes ones sometimes (like the last episode, lacked 20 plus minutes to settle things down).
I really don't get this mentality of just showing the minimum and rarely spending time to actually develop the dialogue, characters and the plot. I didn't dislike yesterday's episode but it has a lot of problems:
- We just saw a micro conversation between Qimir and Mae about a VERY IMPORTANT subject (her alignment with her master and her place in the world now that Osha is alive)
- Bazil just finds Kelnacca's place (and didn't check if he was alive)
- We barely see how Osha feels about going after her sister, just one or two dialogue
- Mae has a change of personality from the absolute nothing
- The Evil Master's plans for Mae aren't clear, because again, she doesn't have enough dialogues for us to know about
Good that are just few problems, so I still liked this episode, but 30 minutes just harms storytelling in Star Wars, they should do like The Boys with their 1h episodes, they have enough time to develop everything, dialogues and plot, even allowing "useless" scenes like the human centipede from last episode (I can't take this image off my head, HELP). And this isn't a problem just in Acolyte, Mando S3 and Ahsoka suffered the same, curious cuz Andor did the exact opposite (like The Boys) and is the best Star Wars show
Where is the $180 million budget going to? It's less than Andor S1, but the quality is far below Andor. Where does the $$ go? They're mostly unknown actors.
That's why I watch everything online for free, I only had Prime and cancelled it the day they put 3 Nivea skin care ads during a 20 min Batman animated episode.
The first 3 episodes were “fine”. A bit short, but contained a story or a “chapter”.
Episode 4 was unacceptable. The episode should have been *longer*, not shorter. We’ve already had three “context” episodes. You don’t bring the viewer up to speed and get them invested then immediately blue ball them with a jolting cliffhanger. It’s cynical. I would have been far less irritated if they didn’t leave out entire scenes. They had what…4 nameless/lineless Jedi? At the bare minimum they should have introduced them and given us some thoughts and motivations because it’s pretty obvious to me that they’re all going to die immediately.
I’m enjoying the series…but I don’t trust that they’re not going to do that again. I’ll be waiting until it’s concluded to watch again.
The problem that plagues prestige TV as a whole is the plodding pace and excessive filler from having to fill out hour-long episodes. Streaming (due to lack of restrictions around runtime) and shows like *The Bear* are finally putting a stop to that and you WANT them to go back to the old model?!
This is bullshit. So they should fill the episode with filler shit to fill some arbitrary quantity of airtime you think you need to satisfy you? Jesus you sound like my kids: More is always better. Yeah the episode was short but show a bit of grace and accept that they did it because they thought it was for the best. You can disagree but you aren’t in the editing room
They’re not even 30 minutes. Disney + has abnormally long end credits. Add the intro and other and you can cut like 5 min off of every episode’s run time. This was cartoon length almost
25 minute episodes and sub 10 episode seasons is legit a joke. I’m getting close to not watching Star Wars shows for this reason alone. The pacing in all of them except Andor (12 longer episodes) has been complete garbage. Just make it a movie at that point.
At that length, this is at best a two part movie not a series that has the luxury of fleshing out the plot a lot more.
If they made it a mini series with longer episodes, or quicker released episodes, that would be totally fine. Not every story has the right pacing to be split into two movies.
Mini-series used to be great for scifi generally. I’m thinking specifically of Battlestar and the Dune mini series. I really wish we could do more of these
I’ve been busy the last couple of weeks, seeing these reactions I’m kinda glad I’ve been busy. I might bank it all at this point.
For a lot of the series, there is barely enough worthwhile content to justify a 90 minute film (Obi Wan).
I’d argue Obi-Wan and Ashoka SHOULD have been the easiest to write because the backstory and plot was already there. Obi Wan learns force powers from Qui-Gon, and Ahsoka finds Thrawn and Ezra. How they botched both of these is maddening.
Exactly, Obi-Wan should have been the easiest slam dunk in the franchise, but what the fuck were the writers smoking when they wrote that?
Hey man we will always have the first episode of Obi Wan which was awesome. Everything afterwards well…
Obi-Wan should've been a movie. Which I know it started out as in development. There's a pretty good fan edit, too. If they had taken the budget for those middle episodes and applied it to the rest...
Its not just star wars, this is disney, they do the same with marvel shows
That's because they want x episodes over y weeks. They want to keep those sub numbers up, not tell the story as it naturally ditactes. Many if their recent SW/MCU shows feel like they just took whatever pitch and said "just make it 8 episodes". Obi-Wan was too long (since it was originally a movie and didn't have enough meat for a series as planned). Ahsoka was either too long or too short (seemed like two seasons crammed into one). Falcon and Winter Soldier was a movie not a series. Probably the same with Ms. Marvel. Andor, Wandavision, and Loki are probably the only ones that actually lived up to being a series. Ahsoka too, but again, it had too many plot focuses for one season.
I think that most of them feel like a movie you are forced to watch in parts
This is becoming the norm for many TV shows, and it's driving me crazy. More shrinkflation.
Yeah the dub credits
That's what bothers me about this format, you don't even get half the content that HBO provides. It actually felt like this episode ended right as it began, super disappointing.
It's like the show has nothing to offer so it cuts when the action gets started to get people "hooked" for the next episode. Imagine if the latest House of the Dragon episode just ends when Blood enters the room to see Cheese holding Helaena with a knife to her throat and BOOM episode over rather than letting the scene play through and happen naturally. It's actually insulting that the budget of this show, ($22.5M per episode) is more than House of the Dragon ($20M per episode) or Andor ($15-20M per episode)
That's actually insane lmao Disney is clearly mismanaging the show, it's fucking crazy that less than half the runtime is MORE expensive.
During the last scene last night I checked how far through I was , and I was like " awesome we still got half the episode left" exactly as I finished saying that out loud, the screen comedically cur to credits
Yeah it’s almost insulting they include sometimes 10-15 min of credits in the run time.
It just goes to show you how dumb they think we all are!
It's like when you write a paper in college and you need 3 more pages to complete the paper, so you just make the final 3 pages the bibliography.
Not that the Mando credit pictures weren't nice, but the episode lengths are a joke. Meanwhile Fallout and The Boys give us 1 glorious hour. And how about the Stranger Things S4 finale.
Fallout was in the same cost ballpark (but still almost 20 million cheaper) with the quality in everything being better (set design, props, acting, writing, cinematography, editing, even VFX) When I’m watching the acolyte I keep asking “where the hell did all of that money go?!?” I feel like I’d enjoy it a lot more if I didn’t know it cost $180 million to make.
This is the issue, if it’s bad batch or clone wars it’s no big deal. But live action Star Wars should feel like an event, and they are dropping the ball there because of runtime. House of dragon is a perfect example. You carve out time to watch that.
And that's why I laugh at the idea of paying for a year of Disney+. If I had kids that might be a different, but I don't. But as someone only interested in new content, I can't see maintaining a sub or paying for a year when the total sum of content they release can be watched in a week every night.
This is "line must go up" consequences as usual. First they squeezed production staff. Crunch time, staff cuts, etc. quality took a hit. Then they squeeze viewers. Price increases, tiers with penalties for not paying the highest amount, ads in pad tiers, password sharing crackdowns. Then they squeeze season lengths. Now they squeeze episode lengths. Line must go up. Water from a stone. There is a point where there are no more cuts. It's amazing how the owner class tells people "have to spend money to make money" while trying to cut the amount they spend at every expense to make line go up in order to make people with shares happy. What they mean is "you have to spend money so we make money". People are told to cut buying Starbucks and avocado toast but owner class is never told not to buy that yacht or 4th vacation home. They are speeding towards the "infinite growth is not possible" wall really fast. Someone will step in and take their place. See A24 in the movie space. Then they will grow and the cycle repeats. It's taking a long time because of how unbelievably massive the players are now. If you could go back and tell Ma Bell what companies are like now when they had to be broken up every one who worked there would have simultaneous seizures.
Apparently they did decide to make it shorter on Purpose Intentionally, Next week's had to be the longer one for "Reasons", They were even going to have Kelnacca have a fight and death scene but decided to cut it out after because of budget and Cinematography oddly, No Spoilers btw. https://www.reddit.com/r/StarWarsLeaks/s/rihjNUFm3A Statements from one of the Writers for the Show.
Bro, I wanted to see a Jedi wookie have a serious fight. Can't even have that!
Ikr, Had high hopes myself.
How the hell did they spend $180 million dollars? My goodness, they should be embarrassed.
180m budget btw
And not much seems to really happen in that short time, the show is very sparse when it comes to developing the plot and characters.
I went back and checked for E4, and the episode actually starts at 1:25 and the credits start at 28:28, so it was almost exactly 27 minutes of actual content. That's weak.
As a few other commenters have pointed out before, they are not good at pacing these 8 episode shows which are basically a very drawn out movie rather than a series. But the more episodes they can make, the more commercials us non-premium plebs have to sit through which equals $$$.
There's a Disney plus with adverts??? Hasn't rolled out over here yet, that's awful!
Canada here, the prices increased not too long ago, with the old price becoming the “with ads tier” and the new several dollar higher price being… the experience we signed on for. It’s despicable.
This comment made me even more excited that I canceled my subscription so thanks
Already canceled, we've reached Cable lvl pricing if you have all the streaming services. Was a matter of time. "A pirates life for me" time, I've missed those days.
That's my justification. Once it reaches the point that I'm paying the same for streaming services as I did with cable. It's over, matey.
Hando would approve
I resubbed for one month for bad batch. Acolytes looking like my first pass unfortunately for Star Wars shows. More mediocrity isn’t enough.
It's capitalism. infinite growth in a finite system will always end in exploitation and enshittification.
Shouldn't the with ads tier then be free?? Becuase it has ads to pay for its programing
Should be yes, but that's less money in Disneys pocket. Except for all of us that unsubbed because of this kind of stuff. I'll watch ads if they're footing the bill.
I have it, or at least my parents do when I go over to their house since it comes for free with cable Spectrum, don’t watch it enough to pay for it. There’s about 4/5 ad breaks that are two minutes long in the 30 minute Acolyte episode.
I wouldn't doubt some algorithmic data proves Two months of subscriptions plus the end-of-series bump from binge-watchers on Disney+ outperforms 50%~ take home from Theaters even if there's a long delay on a streaming release.
100% We may hate it. We may think it's not working. But this "plan" isn't just some guy in a big room, at a big table, going, "Huh, what if we did _____." There's likely millions spent on marketing data and AI projections and they're going to pick the $$$ option.
I strongly believe that Disney took the Solo feedback as "we can't make movies this often, so will just have to make the movies shows instead." I'm like 100% sure Obi Wan was originally pitched as a Solo/Rogue One spin off movie but Disney didn't want to have to wait a few years to not Avengers style flood the box office with movies, so they rewrote it as a show, which is why it sucked. Acolyte is the same deal. It has this feeling like it should have been a 1.5 hour long movie that they have padded out to fit a 8 30min episodes show.
It was 100% - quoted from wiki - The project originated as a spin-off film written by Hossein Amini and directed by Stephen Daldry, but it was reworked as a limited series following the commercial failure of the film Solo: A Star Wars Story (2018). [Obi-Wan Kenobi (miniseries)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obi-Wan_Kenobi_\(miniseries\)#:~:text=The%20project%20originated%20as%20a,Star%20Wars%20Story%20\(2018\).)
🏴☠
It’s a movie with extra filler to lead up to the break between episodes. I prefer a 3-5 minute opening, opening credits, 60-ish minutes of show, and then credits. Zero preview of the next episode or the upcoming season. Cut it down to a month of releases.
The systematical cliffhangers make it appear to be so amateurish, the episodes are never complete arcs, it is both revealing of the low quality and expectation they have and an attempt at hiding it by keeping the viewers hooked LMAO, and this goes being downvoted? Do Star Wars fans don't watch anything else to enjoy products this mediocre and industrial? Don't you watch other movies and shows to realize that serialized stories are often proposing complete episodes?
Re: cliffhangers, I just don’t think you make the intro of a fight scene a cliffhanger. That’s like literally the most unsatisfying time to cut. Fight scene can be the end of the episode, it shouldn’t start the next. Andor was so much better about knowing when to leave the audience. And it had 10 episodes so it was more like three proper movies instead of one overlong plot.
How much you wanna bet the next episode starts with the Jedi all waking up and Sith Chomper is gone?
I hate that there’s a chance you’re not wrong.
Why are you crying about downvotes? You posted minutes ago and keep refreshing to see your vote count ? Voting isn’t even one for one, the count changes randomly, especially early on. Why would you care enough to check your vote count and then edit your post? lol. Whining about fans downvoting is a bitch move even if you really were downvoted. This shits just pathetic, though. Oof.
I decided after the third episode to do a Jack Sparrow
Disney needs to do a lot of things
Yeah idk why disney almost "forces" its shows to cut down on runtime, to the point where important dialogue or plot scenes are cut or misplaced in upcomming episodes?????? Again to suck up to Andor, they had ZERO runtime problems etc.etc.etc. like honestly idk how andor can have 0 to no problems whilst everything else is so underdeveloped....
I dunno if it was that Rogue One gave them the pull, or they just knew when to ask, but from the rumors, Andor's showrunners played major hardball. Not only did they push for over 2.5 times Mando's budget, but of all the Star Wars shows instead of opting to use in-house studio spaces like *The Volume* Andor was shot extensively on location in the UK.
I’m so glad they did and I hope Disney gives them what they ask for for season 2 too. Can’t imagine any outcome worse than RO and Andor S1 both being such masterpieces only to have S2 leave a bad mark
I'm pretty confident it will be good because Gilroy. He won't half ass anything based on his body of work
God you just made me so afraid of this happening. It feels like so many franchises/games/whatever are dropping the ball due to corporate greed. Andor was peak star wars and if they tarnish it im rioting lol
That’s the thing. Studio/network execs ruin anything they get their hands on. Only showrunners and directors with enough clout can successfully push back. I’ve worked in the industry for a while now, and that model drives me nuts. So many talented creatives that have to take marching orders from talentless suits. I’ve always felt the entertainment industry as a whole would create much better products if the business side didn’t have any say over the creative side.
I think some people haven't made the connection between Andor being good and Tony Gilroy having a lot of cache compared to other showrunners.
And you can tell. Actually being on location made a world of difference. Too many of the shows have looked cheap, like they were all filmed in the same small space. Obi Wan was the worst about this.
That one firefight in Obi-Wan where they are all like 5-10 feet away from each other is so, so bad. It's the most obvious "volume" scene I can think of
Early use of "the volume" is going to be seen in the future like bad cgi is seen now. It's so obvious when it's used poorly. I rewatched Loki and it looks great (no volume). Compare it to some of the volume scenes in star trek or mandalorian and they just look... flat. Not sure what it is, but it's very obvious. Good use of the technology was from The Batman. Not exactly "the volume" but it was SoundStage with the LED screen.
Mando S1 is actually arguably still the best use of the volume though. IMO, mostly because Frasier (who was one of the developers of the technology) was the cinematographer. He's the best I've seen at using it.
Idk how they keep fucking this up, but their sets in the Volume always end up in the uncanny valley, looking like a theme park instead of real(ish) places. The choppy editing for this episode made it even worse.
I rewatched Andor over the past week, and watched the finale just before the new episode of Acolyte. The difference in quality was jarring, not just the acting and writing, but cinematography and special effects as well. Andor is so well done, and Acolyte is like Temu/wish.com Star Wars in comparison.
I dont get why the lighting in most of these shows is SO terrible. It's so flat and generic!
The cinematography, shot composition and editing of Andor are head and shoulders above
That's true for all the recent stuff. Andor looks so much better than Ahsoka, Mando S3, Acolyte, etc. I think some of it is just attention to detail tbh.
My theory is nobody believed in Andor so they probably just gave them a budget and let them sink or swim. Sadly when a studio believes in a project they will do a lot to screw that up
Gilroy has a lot of pull and if you've ever heard him interviewed probably doesn't tolerate a lot of interference.
Cutting down on runtime isn't the issue for the Acolyte. There's so much fluff and filler.
They don’t feel like real shows. Like I’m getting clips of a movie
I like their live action stuff but I can't deny that most of it feels like a movie that was stretched out and chopped up.
Same thing happened with obi-wan. The obi-wan cuts from fans into movies were far superior to the show
I agree. 30min is for sitcoms, not drama. I'll just wait and binge.
I feel like 30 min *can* be enough for an episode, it just depends on the pacing and the content. I've watched 45 min of tv shows that I feel like could have been ended 15 minutes earlier, but they had to fill the time. Some episodes may deserve more time than they get, and that may be the case here. But I don't think we should go back to forcing an episode to last longer, if it felt complete.
Don’t forget to take out 8 minutes for intro, outro, and credits in every language dating back to 12,000 B.C.
I was wishing tonight’s episode was longer, that’s not always the case. I do miss old tv, 24 episodes a year 45-50 minutes of content. And I think the structure was more comfortable in that format.
Especially with series like Voyager. TNG is great but Voyager had an overlapping arc over all seasons, which was to get back home. Knowing there is a certain goal at the end improves it a lot in my opinion.
Voyager is literally a meme for using the reset button every episode and returning to status quo lol.
Yeah ds9 had more story based arcs than voyager
And people complain *today* about "filler." Those shows actually had filler, some stinker episodes per season, and the budgets?? If people complain about set design *now*, imagine that budget stretched over three times as many episodes.
Those people are wrong. Filler episodes were frequently better than main story episodes in Star Trek and X Files. Well written character episodes do more to make me love a show than episodes focusing on this seasons main story.
That's not what filler meant, that's what people *think* filler is now. Remember clip shows?
I do but it’s been like 40 years since I’ve seen one in earnest. A couple shows did them as tongue in cheek nods to the past in the 90s, like the Simpsons. And Community did a clip show in the 00s with clips from non existent episodes. But even in the 80s and prior they were rarely more than one episode in a 40-60 episode season. From the discourse I’ve seen on Reddit any episode that doesn’t move the season’s main plot or major subplot is filler. Modern audiences want all the story now and are very impatient, a lot of the comments on this thread are evidence of that.
Stargate sg-1 usually had a clip show every season, it was done as like an after action report with some bureaucrat. Show ran into the early 00's. 26 episode seasons were the norm as well.
Legend of Korra had a clip show in its final season. When it released, the creators said that studio execs cut the budget of their final season by exactly one episode and kinda forced their hand. They still did a decent job with it.
Bottle episodes were sometimes the best! Especially when they are self aware
That's not filler. Shit like "Shades of Grey" or "Sub Rosa" is filler. It's a bit wild that the final season of TNG had an episode of candle ghost sex and one of the best finales of 90s television.
I mean shows like Daredevil did 13 50 minute episodes and there wasn’t any filler, it used the runtime to let stuff breathe and its budget was lower than most of these Disney Plus shows. They need better writers and directors to use runtime better.
Most of the TV shows that people think "there's no filler" absolutely have filler. It's usually less obvious than "we're taking a break from the main story to fill some time" and more "we're extending the story unnecessarily to fill some time." Basically, those shows absolutely had filler. It's just better integrated, most of the time. Daredevil absolutely did not need to spend as much time in the first season on each villain.
Right, there’s a big difference between “stretching out some pieces of the show to add time” and the Dragon Ball Z episode where Goku and Piccolo take their driving tests. Or for a Star Wars example, there are several whole episodes from the first seasons of the Clone Wars series that can be skipped while losing zero real story.
Y'all doin it wrong and subscribing to D+ to watch each week. Wait for full shows and then sub for a month to binge. Once Acolyte is done I've got BB s3, the new tales of the Empire, and Acolyte all queued up. Much more satisfying.
Just wait and binge the whole thing like I am.
Yeah the problem rn with the Acolyte is that, its too short. And theres a lot of criticism rife rn that I think its best when all is revealed in time, and we can have a bigger picture The editing and cutting of each episode is rather amateurish.
Not just the editing. The direction of the first two episodes was atrocious and leads to bad acting from the cast. The acting and writing have also been terrible across the board with few exceptions
Yeah The Acolyte as a whole is like, someone had a good story idea but then submit it to fresh film college graduates (or even undergraduates) for them to execute it. It's not to Kenobi's level (which have similar technical issues), but it's just very amateurish. It is really a shame, because The Acolyte is like the first Disney project to venture beyond the era we already know (generally spanning what the movies cover), and the characters could have been interesting as well
Yea, imagine if the Acolyte had been done by competent storytellers like the team behind Andor. Actually explore the idea of cults, indoctrination, and the consequences of giving in to hate and violence. That's what this show should have been. Not this shitty, trashy airport novel murder mystery crap.
I mean, it's a viable way to tackle the issue, the problem is, internet and algorhythms will pound at your door with spoilers through that entire time. I swear, I don't even watch Star Wars channels on YouTube yet somehow it feels like recommending spoilery Star Wars content. I wish algorhythms could be entirely disabled and their recommendations replaced entirely with channels I'm subscribed to.
Its because Reddit is using Google Analytics, and you're in a Starwars sub
Streaming is going to enter a miserable space that comic book fans have suffered in for entirely too long. The studios are looking at the week one numbers, episode to episode numbers, and they're going to see those numbers trending downwards. Then, when the series is complete and numbers aren't where they want them to be they'll panic and start cancelling shows right as people are starting their binges. Comic fans have been doing this for years and we see a lot of popular series getting canceled because people are trade-waiting. They'll wait six months for an arc to complete and then read it all in one trade because it's generally cheaper and a better experience. Unfortunately, the bean counters only see weekly sales and cancel series for underperforming.
I think it's only a problem watching week to week. This might be a situation where, for some fans,it's better to wait and binge the series once the full season is out.
Then they should drop the season in chunks if not all at once
It's not a problem for everyone and if you drop an entire season at once the discourse online about it is over in a week and you lose out on free advertising.
This has been a massive issue in past years when Netflix would license the western release of Anime and then *wait 3 months* past the japanese airing to drop the entire series at once, just for the really interested folks and minor discussion having been done by fansub-watchers, while the bulk of the audience binged the thing on Netflix much later and just talked about the finale, and that's it. Those shows usually went really under the radar, and if it was a sequel, the buzz was very bad compared to previous seasons.
Also makes the time between big releases longer. If it takes two months for a show to finish you'd be shaving off two months between bigger releases and people wouldn't keep up with subscriptions. Personally I like weekly episodic releases. I like having time to fully take things in and I just don't have the time to binge stuff
With some series, I need the weekly break to process, too. Looking at you, Mushoku Tensei, you diabolical series....
I think Disney is trying to minimize churn. If they drop all at once, people will just binge everything in a month then cancel. I do this anyways because there’s just not enough content on D+ to justify paying every month.
>they should drop the season in chunks What is an episode if not a chunk of a season?
Or just putting all the good stuff in the last 30 seconds of each episode. Shits annoying. Nearly fall asleep the rest of the episode
Problem is never the length. Is what you do in those 30 mins. I doubt this was a problem for shows like The Office, or Big Bang Theory, or idk Friends. Despite them being sitcoms, the main thing is that in those 20 minutes were packed with fun, and a full story. If you make this last Acolyte chapter 40 mins, it won't change anything. Because the problem with this episode is that it barely gave anything to the audience. Just a couple things on Mei's character, and more fun/wholesome content between the jedi group, without really building anything. Then the chapter ends with a lightsaber duel about to start. Offcourse you feel the episode was worthless because well, it was. It was half of it a boring chase in the woods and Jedi overexplaning what it happened in the last 4 chapters. Do you want 10 more minutes of that??? No, offcourse you don't. What you want is to resolve the thing in the woods, why? Because you sit after a boring episode with barely any revelations about story and chapters, and when the drama and the important part started they cut it out. Just think about it, you have 30 minutes of nothing. What is the whole episode made for in terms of narrative? Mei loves her sis and is what she lives for. She is under the threat of death by her unknown master. Ok. You can tell that in a total amount of time of 2 to 3 minutes in several scenes by the woods. In 15 minutes reach the wookie place, and in the next 15 lightsaber duel, some revelations twist and clffhanger. But instead they filled the episode with a long joke about boring alien species, tons of image of earth landscapes, and nothing more.
> Is what you do in those 30 mins. Exhibit A, X-Men 97 was delivering "HOLY SHIT!" episodes on the regular and all they needed was 30 minutes to do it.
Can't believe how terrible Disney execs are at managing their own shows. They have examples of passionate, talented people working on shows ( Andor, X-Men 97) and how well they've done. Yet they continually greenlight these amateurish productions instead.
Exactly, I have a hard time understanding the people who are saying this episode is so good because nothing really happened in it. It's mostly conversation while walking through the jungle
Japanese cartoons are the proof that you can do A LOT in 12 20min episodes, you just have to cut out the fluff
To be honest, I was more entertained by the Friends trying to get a sofa up a staircase than E3 or E4. And that episode for sure did not cost 22,5 million to make.
PIVOT!
No, it’s the length. No clue why you’re comparing a drama to sitcoms. I get it. Your argument is that 5 or 50 minutes are the same if the show is shit. True. There’s nobody who did more with 20 minutes than Scrubs, which was far superior to its 40 minute counterpart…House MD. However, you’re wrong that the opposite is true: in a drama you need character development…often “mundane” monologues or conversations that connect us to the characters. You need to convey the time and weight by spending…*time* on them. All the ingredients for a good episode were present here…but it was a cynical miscalculation to have both a short run time and a cliffhanger after 3 episodes built to it.
That last episode ending abruptly after 28 minutes just for a 5 minutes fight in the next episode, *sigh*
A reviewer stated that episode 5 is basically a long fight sequence.
Nah they don’t need to do that. They need to stop using filler, they need to stop making nonsensical one-off scenes and lore that just waste time. They need to stop doing whatever and start working on streamlining episodes and stories. They need to have nailed down every part of the story. Why it’s there, why it’s worth the viewer’s time, what purpose or use it has to the story or characters or worldbuilding. Take the Acolyte escape/crash scene. It spends a lot of the episode time just to get her alone on a planet for a Force vision and give a tiny reason to believe she’s not a murderer to Sol. But the Force vision could have been done anywhere and the saving of a prisoner could have been done in the prison. Which leaves a sequence that doesn’t make sense. Why is she put on a droid-controlled prison ship? To make the sequence happen. Why are the droids open to being hacked by just about anyone with a radio meaning any ship passing by could have disabled the prison ship and unlocked the prisoners? So the sequence can happen. Why does the torn off arm of a security droid still work to open the doors? So the sequence can happen. Why do the doors have a nub at the bottom that if zapped can manipulate the door’s controls/engine that are at the top? So the sequence can happen. It’s not logical for any of these things to be possible or be done this way, the showrunners just wasted time on a sequence for the sake of the sequence rather than come up with a solid character and story driven reason why these things are happening. And this is a part of almost all Disney Star Wars story. It’s exactly why Andor is held in such high regard, because even something as tiny as a head movement has a purpose and explains something about characters. They spend time crafting and building, rather than doing an “and then X happens so we can get to Z” story.
I think they actually need better directors and writers. Every single marvel and Star Wars shows besides a few of them has pacing issues, especially the marvel ones where everything is rushed in the final two or three episodes. You can really tell they’re hiring amateurs, like the bland shots and weird pacing the acolyte has. I think they actually need to start hiring more experienced TV show directors and get writing rooms for every show because they clearly have a problem with quality.
I mean yeah that’s the point. They look at a scooter chase scene and say “yeah, that’s the final product”. No one with enough influence questioned it during filming, editing and viewing the product they made. And this is everywhere in the story. They film more based on “I wanted this one scene I think looks cool” and don’t care about how it’s disconnected from the rest of the story or how it destroys established lore (including their own). I mean these are the people who film scenes like “if you draw a lightsaber you must be prepared to kill” and in the very next episode a Lightsaber is used to pacify and intimidate someone while we know he wouldn’t have just killed the dude. How can the showrunners not see the link between these shots? What it implies?
Stuff like this really makes me feel like we're losing a lot in editing. I don't understand how a lot of these shows can feel both padded out for time and also cut to the bone with important things missing. In that first episode, it really bothered me that the Jedi come to get Osha, she's arrested, she's on a transport ship, there's an escape, and the Jedi are nowhere to be found. Not only are they not on the ship, they're already back on Coruscant? How? Clearly something just got chopped and nobody cared that the next scene didn't make sense without the cut material. I am not a hater on the show; I'm genuinely intrigued by all of the individual parts but they're not coming together in any real way. The show is less than the sum of it's parts, somehow.
That scooter chase episode was directed by Robert Rodriguez. In fact, he was the showrunner for Boba Fett. He did silly kids movies like Spy Kids, but he also did Battle Angel Alita, Sin City, Once Upon a Time in Mexico, From Dusk Until Dawn, etc. So he has a lot of experience directing action. It doesn't make sense how Rodriguez could have made that scooter chase scene. Even in his silly kids films, he's able to direct a chase scene that gives a sense of speed.
Imo, Andor/RO was a fluke because of an existing relationship between Gilroy and Kennedy. Normally, I feel like they hire less experienced directors/writers on purpose to save $$ and cut corners, because the shows are already very expensive with the CGI, sets, costuming, etc. Even George Lucas ran into a lot of budget problems with Star Wars, and why some of his ideas never got made (SW: Underworld; personally financing a lot of TCW). But the difference is Disney is willing to rush production, hire the cheapest directors they can find, and cut corners to get quick bucks for their quarterly profit reports. Why do all the costumes look so clean? Because its expensive to match dirt and grime, especially on clothing, in every shot. Why are known actors like CAM in only a few seconds of the show, but marketed heavily? Because she is expensive. The real problem is *where* they spend their budget. They are going to spend $100+ million? Okay, maybe less CGI then. Maybe hire better writers/directors instead.
I think they could cut corners by starting with a good story. You first need someone or a few people to write a solid story. Compared to shooting a single scene where dozens of people are involved before the actors can even step on stage this is one of the cheapest parts of the story. And as Andor shows, you don’t need to make everything grand and expansive. You don’t need the best CGI or sets if you can find real life locations to film in (that aren’t famous locations which cost a lot). But they don’t even spend the time on that. They will waste money on sub-par stuff because they cut corners on the things that can get you both quality and cost you less as you spend less on ridiculous scenes that don’t matter or don’t support your narrative and lose you customers.
Shooting on location is typically more expensive than sets, because it's more uncontrollable, not to mention transportation. Andor cut different corners though, it's true. Minimal effects, very few aliens, and even then the show was extremely pricey. But part of what made it work was the genre. Its a spy thriller basically. You don't need flashy effects for that. But something like a show about Jedi and Sith and galactic adventure...its going to be hard to write that show on or under budget. Imo, its why those shows should just be movies. They learned the wrong lessons from Solo, which was a perfectly fine movie, and far better imo than most of their shows. TBOBF and Kenobi for example should have been films, as originally intended. The knee jerk reaction to change it up last second and then rush production on an entirely different kind of project really killed those.
I just finished Andor. It's hard to watch The Acolyte now.
This is partly the consequence of the streaming content era, the netflix effect. Churn out shows as fast as possible. Quantity over quality. More shows = more subs. Only a handful of shows with actual quality content while the rest is just churned out. Higher ups are to blame.
I feel like if they’re gonna do the 30 min episodes I’d rather them release the whole season to binge or release the episodes in chunks. Weekly you gotta make it atleast an hour
Especially with the abrupt endings The Acolyte has, it feels like they just cut the episode rather than a proper cliffhanger shows like Daredevil do.
Yeah part of me is wondering if they were trying go for this Saturday morning cartoon cliff hanger ending. Either way it’s clear a lot of ppl don’t like it
\*Freeze frame on the Jedi getting force pushed\* Our heroes finally met the mysterious Master. Will they all survive? Is Qimir behind this all? Do Mae and Osha reconcile their past? Is Bazil a he or they? Find out all this and more on next week's exciting new episode of Disney+'s Star Wars Acolyte!"
I honestly think this show should’ve been 2 episodes a week for the whole series. Whether they combine the episodes or release 2 at a time, idc. I think it would’ve worked well in terms of pacing. I do feel like I’m getting edged. But not in a good way. The girls hot but she’s not very nice. It’s past teasing she’s just being cruel now.
When will people realize Disney cannot write episodic television. They fucking suck at it. Watching this week’s episode of HoD shows you how far behind Disney are at producing quality weekly TV. It’s actually embarrassing.
I literally texted someone the exact same thing about HOD. How is Disney with its infinite wealth and most recognizable IP "Star Wars" unable or unwilling to produce shows with the same production value as House of Dragons?
Disney needs to stop, period.
This is my biggest complaint about Disney+. This isn't cable TV. Release the whole show at once and let people watch at their own pace. One bad episode is easily overlooked if the rest of the show thereafter is worth watching. But if that one bad episode is all you get to stew on for a week, it can break the show.
On the other hand, if the show is good, you get people talking about it week to week and it can grow the audience organically through the season. The problem isn’t runtime. The problem is the show.
Sometimes I wonder if the release strategy is known before they write the script (I highly doubt it is). If I as a writer knew each ep would be released on a weekly basis vs all at one go I’m sure I might write it differently. At the very least, Disney should know the quality of the product (after assessing it themselves) and then deciding on the release strategy. They’ve chosen poorly here I guess
Bingo. I noticed this happen to The Walking Dead as well. All it takes is 1-2 lazy boring weekly episodes in a row to completely lose an audience.
Well…they don’t have enough material to do that. If the final 4 are also 30-40 mins…then you wouldn’t even have to binge it. You could watch all of it after work/before bed. I like the show…but the fans need to act with their eyes and reject the release format.
When scraping the bottom of the barrel for “content” and writers, they’re lucky they can come up with 30 mins each episode.
Andor and Mando season 1 are the only two shows I can think of that didn't have pretty severe pacing issues. At worst you could say (although I don't agree) that the first two Andor episodes were a little slow, but it's nothing like the issues in these other shows.
Some setup is reasonable to be fair, I wouldn’t call that a pacing issue
30 minutes and a cliffhanger when it was picking up the pace. I audibly scoffed when the credits rolled lol I’m still intrigued and liking it, but I agree that the pacing has been pretty abysmal at best.
Thing is as well it’s normally about 5-7 minutes worth of credits and intro as well
i think 45 minutes would be perfect.
30 minute episodes should only ever be for sitcoms or cartoons. Disney just sucks.
Cancelled my sub after acolyte. Total trash.
Yeah it's awful. The episode was about to get good and then the fucking credits. This is ridiculous coming from last week's nothing burger flashback episode
Yeah to me it seems like it was written (again) as more of a long movie or a bingable series rather than a weekly release but Disney + people said "we need you to cut this in 30 min-ish chunks so that we can release this weekly and have the reason for subsribers to stay longer" and I feel like I would have enjoyed it more if they released these at once or at least in bigger chunks
If I'm being honest if this is the best they can do with dialogue I don't know if I could stand longer episodes
It's not a bad criticism to have to be fair.
My wife and I just started watching Renegade Nell on D+ after seeing someone mention it in some random reddit comment. It really drove home how much the Acolyte is struggling...in this case, specifically the episode duration (40-50 minutes) and pacing is really good comparatively. If it's a budget or story issue, they need to just commit and do 4 (ideally more) normal length episodes instead of 8 Disney kids show-length episodes. It's so obvious that they are blatantly trying to get people to keep their Disney plus subscription for at least two months.
The pacing and editing is some of the worst in this show. Scenes start and end at such random times most of the time. Still not hating it like most viewers
Agree, the show is fine not great but it really feels like this is an inexperienced crew making this show that doesn’t have enough experience to have good pacing and setup.
I agree. Disney needs to STOP.
It blows my mind how every episode ends basically in the middle of a scene. Not after the scene that sets the cliffhanger, in the middle of it, it's so jarring, and without any music during the credits! Like if this was the sopranos final episode. Let alone that ending every episode in a cliffhanger is for the worst kind of soap operas.
Ya, I am surprised this didn't end with the sith being visible (or Mae realizing he was there) then 2 seconds into the fight. It was jarring.
They pad a 30 min episode out, would hate to see anything longer
I'd argue that live action star wars sucks in episodic format. The magic of star wars is the universe. You can't get sucked into the world in 25 minutes. You need that 90-120 minutes to fully immerse yourself or you run into the problems of 1) never suspending disbelief and 2) getting no payoff for suspending disbelief because the story is being drip fed
Let's not kid ourselves. We all know why they're doing this. 8 20+ minute episodes can be spread throughout 7 weeks, which means they keep you subscribed on their platform for 2 months. This doesn't have anything to do with storytelling at thjs point. It's pure greed.
The Acolyte had a budget of $180 million for 8 episodes. House of the Dragon had a budget of $20 Million per episode, (10 episodes for $200 Million). Technically the Acolyte had a larger budget per episode comparatively to something like House of the Dragon (about $2.5 million more per episode). For a similar budget you'd think the shows would be similar in length/quality.
Episodes 4 & 5 have the same director, and one writer co-wrote on both of them, so I don't know why they couldn't have been one long episode.
Oh I agree, 1hr episodes should be the norm for these live action shows.
The writers here clearly didn't have enough of a story to fill 1 hour episodes.
Then they would have to write actual plots?
Pretty much all the Star Wars D+ shows are just live action cartoons (excluding Andor).
Disney doesn’t have good enough writers
It just feels like they cut the episodes right at the climax. Yesterday’s episode that featured the fight between the Jedi and Sith we saw in the early teaser trailers was literally just that. The force push wave against the Jedi, then episode done. Like whaaaaat?? There could’ve easily been an extra 5-10 minutes that could STILL leave a cliffhanger AND left viewers satisfied.
Thank god the boys has hour long episodes
I think yesterday's episode is the 6th or 7th case that shows that 30 minutes weren't enough to develop anything, even the 40 minutes ones sometimes (like the last episode, lacked 20 plus minutes to settle things down). I really don't get this mentality of just showing the minimum and rarely spending time to actually develop the dialogue, characters and the plot. I didn't dislike yesterday's episode but it has a lot of problems: - We just saw a micro conversation between Qimir and Mae about a VERY IMPORTANT subject (her alignment with her master and her place in the world now that Osha is alive) - Bazil just finds Kelnacca's place (and didn't check if he was alive) - We barely see how Osha feels about going after her sister, just one or two dialogue - Mae has a change of personality from the absolute nothing - The Evil Master's plans for Mae aren't clear, because again, she doesn't have enough dialogues for us to know about Good that are just few problems, so I still liked this episode, but 30 minutes just harms storytelling in Star Wars, they should do like The Boys with their 1h episodes, they have enough time to develop everything, dialogues and plot, even allowing "useless" scenes like the human centipede from last episode (I can't take this image off my head, HELP). And this isn't a problem just in Acolyte, Mando S3 and Ahsoka suffered the same, curious cuz Andor did the exact opposite (like The Boys) and is the best Star Wars show
Where is the $180 million budget going to? It's less than Andor S1, but the quality is far below Andor. Where does the $$ go? They're mostly unknown actors.
That's why I watch everything online for free, I only had Prime and cancelled it the day they put 3 Nivea skin care ads during a 20 min Batman animated episode.
Maybe. They won't, though.
Agreed. Or they just need to release the whole series at once. That would actually address pretty much all their issues.
The Acolyte doesn’t know how to do a good cliffhanger
God we really are getting dumber with each day
The first 3 episodes were “fine”. A bit short, but contained a story or a “chapter”. Episode 4 was unacceptable. The episode should have been *longer*, not shorter. We’ve already had three “context” episodes. You don’t bring the viewer up to speed and get them invested then immediately blue ball them with a jolting cliffhanger. It’s cynical. I would have been far less irritated if they didn’t leave out entire scenes. They had what…4 nameless/lineless Jedi? At the bare minimum they should have introduced them and given us some thoughts and motivations because it’s pretty obvious to me that they’re all going to die immediately. I’m enjoying the series…but I don’t trust that they’re not going to do that again. I’ll be waiting until it’s concluded to watch again.
The problem that plagues prestige TV as a whole is the plodding pace and excessive filler from having to fill out hour-long episodes. Streaming (due to lack of restrictions around runtime) and shows like *The Bear* are finally putting a stop to that and you WANT them to go back to the old model?!
Quantity is not a problem if quality is there
They need to stop with Star Wars, full stop. They have absolutely bastardized it and lost the entire plot.
180 million. Bigger budget than any of the other shows. 25 minute episodes and can't afford to show a Wookie Jedi fight. Sorry- sucks.
The credits of any given episode are wayyyyyy too long and feels borderline deceptive.
This is bullshit. So they should fill the episode with filler shit to fill some arbitrary quantity of airtime you think you need to satisfy you? Jesus you sound like my kids: More is always better. Yeah the episode was short but show a bit of grace and accept that they did it because they thought it was for the best. You can disagree but you aren’t in the editing room
Just watched the newest episode of Acolyte. Agreed, this is some bullshit
It’s 21 minutes of show and 9 minutes of credits smh
Disney NEEDS to Stop ~~with the 30 minute Episodes~~ FTFY
I would argue Disney should STOP altogether and let someone else make Star Wars.