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

Qimir in The Acolyte — (Image credit: Disney/Lucasfilm)

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.

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"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.