After Netflix revealed a glowing preview of several of its biggest upcoming projects during Geeked Week, the week will sadly end with the news of yet another likely cancellation.
Earlier this week, news broke that the critically acclaimed animated adventure Midnight Gospel would not be returning for a second season. The show's removal is part of a growing trend for the streamer to cut its anime projects en masse, and it looks like another show has bitten the dust.
According to What's On Netflix(Opens in a new tab), a news website that prides itself on keeping up with the most recent whereabouts of the streamer, Adventure Beast, another adult-focused animation, won't be back for a while. .
The website reached out to the show's creators, and while it didn't use the word 'cancelled,' the response was crystal clear: "At this time, unfortunately, Netflix has no plans to produce Season 2."
Spanning 12 episodes, Adventure Beast followed an animated version of Bradley Trevor Grieve, a real-life naturalist and explorer, who played a fictionalized version of himself on the show.
The show featured the adventures of Grieve, her eager assistant, and her overconfident niece as they travel to weird and wonderful places to save various wild beasts.
Unlike Midnight Gospel, which critics loved, Adventure Beast had a more mixed reaction, scoring just 5.2 on IMDb (opens in a new tab), but clearly Grieve and company expected more.
An undeniable trend...
Adventure Beast and Midnight Gospel premiered in 2020 and have been quietly in limbo with Netflix for some time, with news of their demise only arriving in recent days. But Netflix's commitment to animated projects is clearly on the decline.
Netflix's director of development and creative leadership for original animation, Phil Rynda, left the company in late April, and it's been a bloodbath for planned and ongoing projects ever since.
Roald Dahl's The Twits, which had been heralded with much fanfare, has been scrapped, as has a new series based on Jeff Smith's beloved comic series Bone, Lauren Faust's Toil and Trouble and Wings Of Fire, which was overseen. By Ava DuVernay of Selma. .
Meghan Markle's animated epic Pearl, Netflix's hugely expensive team's first deal with the Duchess, has also been cancelled.
On top of that, the streamer decided to pause more educational animated programming with Antiracist Baby, an animated series aimed at very young children, and With Kind Regards From Kindergarten, which was a movie aimed at the same demographic. Both projects were canceled before leaving development.
Netflix isn't done with animation, mind you. Yesterday (June 9), the streamer announced a new animated version of Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol (opens in a new tab), a sequel to the hit holiday animation Klaus, and a widescreen version of Richard Curtis's children's book, ThatChristmas.
While all of these projects sound like sure hits, we'll have to keep an eye on their progress. After all, you would have thought that the influence of a royal princess could put something into production, but Netflix had other plans...