Another animated series may have been cancelled by Netflix.
It’s well-known that Netflix has a tendency to cancel series that aren’t performing as well as the streaming company would like, and this isn’t the first time this has happened. This year, Netflix has already seen double-digit cancellations due to a decline in subscribers for the first time in almost a decade.
Netflix hasn’t made many of these cancellations official for the obvious reasons: it’s depressing and poor press. This has resulted in the majority of our information coming from the creatives themselves, either on social media or in the form of a leak to the media.
As a result, the 2021 release of Adventure Beast, an animated nature mockumentary, is a bit of an outlier. It was shocking to hear from Netflix that “at this moment, Netflix have no plans to create Season 2 sadly” when they were contacted by What’s On Netflix(opens in new tab).
Of course, this isn’t the same as saying “cancelled,” but that’s probably just a matter of semantics. As long as there are no surprise hits that suddenly become popular beyond their original release date, a show’s debut window is its best bet for obtaining enough viewers to warrant a second season. To put it bluntly, Adventure Beast’s costs haven’t been justified yet, and they won’t be.
The media’s near-total absence of coverage is likely contributing to the current state of affairs. Not enough critic reviews are available for Rotten Tomatoes to declare an opinion on whether or not a programme is worth watching. Metacritic can’t find it either.
On IMDB, however, it has an average rating of 5.2 and every positive comment is balanced out by a negative one, placing it squarely in the contentious category. In the words of one critic, “Netflix doesn’t care about it,” the movie is “soon forgotten” not because of its excellence.
That’s All Folks?
BoJack Horseman, F is for Family, and Big Mouth, three of Netflix’s earlier animated series, have all prospered over numerous seasons, but Netflix seems to have less and less patience for cartoon projects lately.
Other projects including Bone, Tuca & Bertie and The Twits and Toil and Trouble were either scrapped before they were released or modified as one-off features rather than whole series. Even if you’re royalty, Netflix can still axe your show without warning, as Meghan Markle discovered when her animated series Pearl was abruptly cancelled.
Even yet, it’s evident that the platform hasn’t completely given up on animation. A Christmas Carol, That Christmas, and a sequel to Klaus were all revealed yesterday.
However, these are solid bets that are sure to be seen again and again throughout December. Some believe Netflix will be more careful in the future, limiting the number of risky animation projects it takes on.
Hopefully. F is for Family and BoJack Horseman would be losing out on something if they weren’t available to stream for free.