Disney+’s Star Wars: The Acolyte Set for Record-Breaking Runtime

Star Wars’ upcoming Disney+ series The Acolyte may have no solid release date as of yet, but it seems to have had its entire first season runtime made public.

Leslye Headland’s Sith-focused series caught the eye of Star Wars fans the world over, as it looks to tell the first live-action pre-prequel era story in the franchise’s history.

The project is supposedly set to debut sometime in 2024 with filming officially underway in the United Kingdom.

No specific plot details have been made public on the project, but Headland teased the project will ask, “How did we get here? And why are the Jedi like this?” leading into The Phantom Menace.

Eight Hours of The Acolyte on Deck

According to a new listing, fans can expect some record-breaking runtimes in Disney+’s The Acolyte. 

A post on an agency site for the project’s Intimacy Coordinator Adelaide Waldrop lists the series as having eight episodes that’ll each be approximately 60 minutes long, which will seemingly allow at least one Acolyte installment to break the record for the longest live-action Disney+ Star Wars episode.

Currently, the longest Star Wars streaming episode belongs to The Bad Batch whose premiere clocked in at 1 hour and 11 minutes, although that project was animated.

On the live-action side, The Mandalorian Season 3 just broke the runtime record, with its third episode running 56 minutes and 11 seconds.

This is also the first time fans have gotten an indication of how many episodes The Acolyte will run with eight seemingly being the golden number. This is typical amongst some of its Star Wars streaming cohorts.

The Mandalorian Seasons 1 and 2 both have eight episodes a piece. So this listing puts The Acolyte in line with Jon Favreau and Dave Filoni’s flagship Star Wars show.

Has The Acolyte Runtime Actually Been Revealed?

Some will look at these numbers and scoff at their legitimacy, as placeholder figures are used in this manner all the time. However, looking deeper at this agency post, these numbers might hold more water than one would think.

If The Acolyte was the only title listed, then it would be more difficult to discern if this 60-minute figure was authentic, but the listing includes other titles, with correct episode counts and runtimes.

Other series on Adelaide Waldrop’s resume include Netflix’s You Season 4 and Amazon Prime’s The Great, which have 10 episodes at 50 minutes and 10 episodes at 45 minutes respectively.

Most of the episodes for these series come in right around their listed mark (usually within five minutes of their listed lengths here). So while every episode of The Acolyte may not be exactly 60 minutes, fans can expect the series to run on the longer side, getting closer to an hour than some of its streaming brethren.

The Acolyte is expected to debut on Disney+ sometime in 2024.