The Acolyte showrunner responds to review-bombing of her Star Wars show: “I think it’s pretty expected”

The Acolyte showrunner Leslye Headland has responded to the review-bombing of her new Star Wars show – and she thinks it’s “concerning” but “expected”.  

“Oh, yes. Everybody knows what review-bombing is like. Truly when the show first came out, my publicist was like, ‘OK, with the review…’ I was like, ‘Does anybody take that seriously anymore?'” Headland told Collider. 

‘Review-bombing’ is when a group mobilizes online to post multiple negative user reviews of a show or movie in order to harm its popularity and ticket sales, and The Acolyte was a victim of this when it first premiered last month. On Rotten Tomatoes, for example, the show currently holds a critics’ score of 83%, but an audience score of 14%. The Last Jedi, the second movie in the Star Wars sequel trilogy, was also subject to review-bombing when it was released back in 2017.

“I understand the point of it, which is that the average viewer would look at the site and say, ‘Oh, the user review is really low,'” Headland continued. “But I think that, if you’re in the Star Wars fandom, I think you already know what review-bombing is. So I guess if you’re totally new to the fandom and you’re considering watching the show, it could affect you. But I also think that my work in the past has been very word-of-mouth anyway, so I don’t know if it… I think that because behind the scenes, we all know what it is – it’s not that it’s not concerning – but I think it’s pretty expected, I would say.”

The Acolyte is set around 100 years before the events of The Phantom Menace and follows Osha (Amandla Stenberg), a young woman who gets caught up in a Jedi investigation into a series of murders. The cast also includes Manny Jacinto, Lee Jung-jae, and Dafne Keen.

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