Skeleton Crew
Skeleton Crew ended its first season last night with an excellent finale that caps off one of Disney’s best Star Wars projects.
It is also its least successful by quite a wide margin, it seems.
There’s no real way to spin that Skeleton Crew is simply not a meaningful hit for Disney, and despite its quality, seems unlikely to get a second season despite positive reviews from both critics, and even jaded fans, thanks to the eternal viewership vs. cost problem.
As it stands, Skeleton Crew appears to be the least-watched Star Wars show ever, below even The Acolyte which set the record, coming in below Andor. Skeleton Crew did not chart with Nielsen in its first few weeks at all, something The Acolyte managed at least a couple times, and it does not seem likely that when the chart catches up to present day, that’s going to change.
So, it wasn’t well-watched. But it was cheap, right? Well, there’s cheap, and there’s “cheap for Disney Star Wars.” While The Acolyte clocked in at an absurd $200+ million, Skeleton Crew was “only” reportedly $136 million, breaking down to $17 million an episode for The final season of Game of Thrones cost $15 million an episode.
What Andor, The Acolyte and Skeleton Crew all have in common is that they feature no core characters from the Skywalker/Dave Filioni era, needing to stand on their own. This bodes poorly for Disney’s need to get away from the Skywalker era, but it shows they really can’t effectively, at least if these budgets stay as sky-high as they’ve been.
Skeleton Crew
Skeleton Crew was a genuinely great show. Even as the Star Wars fanbase is constantly in turmoil in the Disney era, most came together to acknowledge how fun and well-done it was. It’s got a 91% critic score and an 81% audience score, and I think most people would be excited to see it return.
The show is fortunate in that, unlike The Acolyte, it was designed to theoretically have what feels like a concrete ending. But those behind the show really wanted more. From co-creator Jon Watts:
“Yeah, we wanted to make sure this season had a satisfying beginning, middle, and end. But, if people want to see more Skeleton Crew, we’d be happy to make more.”
“It’s exciting to think about. We’ve mainly been focused on telling this story, but there’s always a chance that they [the kids] could meet some surprising people in the future.”
The only way Skeleton Crew gets another season is if Disney thinks that a quality show like this, a rare win for the brand at this point, deserves to return as a beacon of kind of content they can still make, regardless of how little it was viewed and how much it cost. Again, there has to be a way to keep these budgets down, and a show like The Acolyte might have even lived if it didn’t cost the GDP of a small country.
Disney has said that it wants more series that are actual series, less one-off miniseries and lead-ins to spin-offs and movies. Skeleton Crew would be a great place to start that, and yet barring some miracle, it’s headed to the Disney Plus graveyard like so many other shows before it.
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Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.
