I guess the biggest issue is when you have something like A New Hope or Avengers that busted blocks hard, some people expect everything that follows in the franchise to be for everyone as well. So when they date to do a project that isn't that, they lose their shit and do everything they can to sabotage it. I assume when they grow up, they'll look back with pride at how hard they ruined the rotten tomato score for a show they didn't like.
Someone did a study about viewership and how people want things to be almost the exact same, over and over again, with JUST enough variance to feel new. So any time a franchise someone's attached their entire personality to (not just talking Star Wars here, it's everything, Trekkers or like, Twilight fans apply just as well) tries something new a certain population of the fandom will lose their shit. And because the internet has created a trumpet people can nestle into their rectum, those opinions get very loud.
Which is too bad, because one of, say, Marvel's strengths is that each project for a long time was a different genre. This is a spy thriller, this is a Shakespearean drama, this is a sitcom, this is a found family story. So absolutely not everything was meant to be for everybody, but modern audiences expect everything to be crafted in a way that it appeals to the mass audience.
Oddly enough, one of the great strengths of the Clone Wars cartoon was that it leaned into this idea VERY heavily. This episode is a murder mystery. This episode is a KAIJU movie. This episode is a WWII homage. It was a playground of ideas for Star Wars to play with, which was a brilliant storytelling process. I do think live action Star Wars viewers are far, far, farrrrrr more rigid in their expectations of what Star Wars brings to the table. (If Andor wasn't once in a lifetime great television, we'd hear so much more complaining about the lack of lightsabers and aliens, but the brilliance of the production makes it somewhat immune to those complaints.) I don't think the Acolyte, while I liked it, was what I'd call brilliant, and so it lacked that armor from anti-fans. (And this doesn't even get into the bigotry factor but that's an entirely different conversation and I don't have THAT in me on this particular Friday.)
But anyway. I do think it's funny how maligned the Acolyte is but they got just amazing figures of almost every core character, while we Andor fans are over here wondering if we'll ever get Melshi, Maarva, or Syril...
