Star Wars: The Acolyte’s first fight footage got me more excited than any trailer could have

We’ve gotten a handful of Star Wars: The Acolyte trailers, but what sold me was a one-minute clip showcasing the upcoming series in action. 

The upcoming series Star Wars: The Acolyte has always been billed as a martial arts mystery set during the High Republic, an era of Star Wars predating the prequel trilogy of hundreds of years. 

The High Republic itself is relatively uncharted territory, only having been explored in comics and novels prior to this series. Thanks to that setting, The Acolyte will feature a radically different Jedi Order than we typically see.

The marketing for The Acolyte has been sparse, but the latest teaser-–a one-minute clip showcasing one of the series’ fights—has done more to get me excited about this project than any Star Wars trailer has. 

Why I’m excited for Star Wars: The Acolyte

For me, the appeal of The Acolyte was always that it’s a mystery story with a martial arts undertone. So the best thing they released to get my attention was a short clip of Lee Jung-jae’s Sol and Amandla Stenberg’s mysterious Mae in a pitched fight. 

The brief glimpse at this fight is incredible, a duel between two skilled fighters that tells us all we need to know about their characters. It’s a tense showdown, with Mae out for blood and Sol trying to make sense of the sudden attack. 

But we see how these characters are thinking, too. Mae is immediately trying to steal Sol’s lightsaber. Sol is more attentive, observing that Mae attacks him unarmed before stealing her few weapons, a handful of throwing knives. 

There’s a lot to pick up about the series from this very snappy minute of footage, and it’s exciting to finally see some crisp, tense action in a new Star Wars project, something the franchise has had trouble finding a balance with. But there have already been trailers before this…so why didn’t the trailers get me as excited? 

Star Wars has always struggled with trailers

Before we get too deep into this, let me briefly set the table for Star Wars and its tumultuous relationship with trailers. Do note that this isn’t necessarily Star Wars’ fault. The idea of a flashy movie trailer is fairly recent. Trailers have only become more elaborate as the Internet makes them more available.

However, the fact remains that Star Wars never had terribly exciting trailers. The first The Empire Strikes Back teaser is mainly headshots of Star Wars characters and concept art flying by while someone mispronounces Leia’s name.

Fans wouldn’t get a truly notable trailer until Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace. Much like with Batman a decade before, fans were buying tickets to then-current movies just to see the trailer and then leaving the theater.

But, like that Batman trailer, you don’t remember it because it’s good. You remember it because it was a once-in-a-lifetime occurrence. We hadn’t gotten an actual new Star Wars movie in over a decade at that time, and the return of Star Wars was a marketing juggernaut. It was everywhere for years.

The Phantom Menace trailer, consisting of disjointed segments of footage and voiceover, did make history, at least. It was the first new Star Wars trailer with a significant online presence, and a second trailer released via the official website managed to rack up over a million views on its first day, despite eager fans managing to crash the servers.

But it’s mostly downhill after that. A lot of the shine was rubbed off by The Phantom Menace’s poor reception. While Attack of the Clones and Revenge of the Sith dropped huge trailers, they just didn’t get the same buzz. 

The trailer for The Force Awakens, released just shy of a decade after Revenge of the Sith, was a similarly exciting release. By then, though, movie trailers had evolved into something to be dissected and picked apart by hungry fans. That trailer for The Force Awakens banks on the sense of nostalgia you get seeing Han and Chewie on the Falcon in its final moments.

That excitement is now more-or-less gone for good, too. We now get a new Star Wars trailer practically every year, be it for a new movie, TV show, or video game. And while these trailers are met with excitement and clicks and news articles galore, they just don’t generate the same buzz as they once did. 

The Acolyte sold me not with a trailer but with a fight

Which brings us back to Star Wars: The Acolyte. We’re now two trailers deep into the upcoming series, and both trailers have been…fine. They showcase a lot of Jedi and a minimum of one Sith, and they do include a lot of lightsabers to reassure anxious fans that, yes, this is still a Star Wars.

However, the trailers for The Acolyte, particularly the second trailer, seem to almost downplay the mystery and the combat. You may have watched those trailers, but do you remember that part of Mae and Sol’s fight was in the very first trailer just two months ago? Or the footage of Carrie-Anne Moss’s Indara having a similar fight scene with Mae? 

Carrie Anne-Moss’ work on The Matrix is partially responsible for The Acolyte’s approach to fights.

It’s a downfall of modern trailers, not just Star Wars. The footage is quick and cuts quickly around to create bite-size moments that hook you in. It has nothing to do with viewer’s attention spans as some filmmakers will try to convince you, but it is an attempt to marry the studio-tested desire to give away as much as possible while not making you stare at a continuous shot for too long.

That’s why the clip got me so excited. By just letting me see the world, it highlights The Acolyte’s approach to action and world-building. We see how Sol and Mae move, fight, and think. We get a glimpse of a practical application of the Force in fighting, something even Star Wars: Ahsoka aspired to do but ultimately came up short on. 

Obviously, it’s not a marketing scheme that works for everyone, but maybe this is the new way companies should be selling their movies. I can’t help but mentally compare The Acolyte to Shang-Chi & the Legend of the Ten Rings, a film that had some okay trailers, but all anyone talked about was the action. Would Shang-Chi have gotten more hype if it released a full minute of its chaotic bus fight instead of another three-minute trailer set to a popular music track?

As it stands, I was already looking forward to the series, but if the released fight scene is representative of what we’re getting from the full series, I’m now actually excited for The Acolyte. I feel like I have a better idea of what to expect from characters. I honestly am going into the premiere, and I already think Sol is cool as hell! And it’s all thanks to a one-minute clip that did more for me than any trailer did.

Star Wars: The Acolyte will Force jump onto Disney+ with a two-episode premiere on June 4, 2024. If you’re looking for more Star Wars action, read up on the recently announced Mandalorian & Grogu movie, Andor Season 2, or everything we know so far about the upcoming New Jedi Order movie. Finally check out our breakdown of the Star Wars timeline.