Resident Evil canceled at Netflix; no season 2 coming
According to a new report from Deadline, the streaming service has canceled their version of the survival-horror franchise after just one season, signaling further that just because they have big IPs doesn’t mean that they always know how to handle them. Our thinking was that they wanted to recreate here the success that they’ve had with The Witcher, but there were a couple of problems with that. First, The Witcher had source material beyond just the games; also, it hadn’t been as saturated as Resident Evil has over the past couple of decades.
Think of it this way: There have been the original games, remakes of several of those games, and a number of feature films already out there. We’re just not sure outside of diehard fans that there was that much of an audience out there, and that has been illuminated further in some of the data. The biggest reason for this cancellation is simply a lack of viewership, as the new adaptation didn’t catch on. It also was not worth the money that Netflix was spending for it.
When you also think about the sheer number of other programs that Netflix has, the reason behind this cancellation becomes all the more clear. They know that they have so many other programs that they can turn to and because of that, they don’t have to be altogether loyal to any one thing that they’ve already picked up. It’s similar to how they canceled Cowboy Bebop after only one season, despite a great deal of hype for the live-action adaptation of that story. (Resident Evil did not even have the pre-premiere buzz that show did.)
We doubt that this series, in its current form, will be picked up elsewhere, but we will have more updates in the event that it is.
Are you shocked that Resident Evil has been canceled at Netflix?
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