After Netflix unveiled a glowing look at many of its biggest upcoming projects during Geeked Week, the week will unfortunately end with news of another likely cancellation.
Earlier in the week, news broke that Midnight Gospel, a critically acclaimed animated adventure, would not be returning for a second season. The show’s cut comes as part of a growing trend for the streamer, who is cutting back on their animated projects en masse, and it looks like another show has bitten the dust.
According to What’s on Netflix (opens in new tab)a news site that prides itself on keeping up to date with the streamer’s latest comings and goings, Adventure Beast, another adult-focused animation, will not be returning for a second season.
The site reached out to the show’s creators, and while it didn’t use the word ‘cancelled’, the response was very definitive, saying, “At this stage, Netflix has no plans to produce a second season, unfortunately.”
With 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 series.
The show showcased the adventures of Grieve, her eager assistant and her confident niece as they head to strange and wonderful locations to save various wild beasts.
Unlike Midnight Gospel, which critics liked, Adventure Beast had a more mixed reaction, with a score of just 5.2 on IMDb (opens in new tab)but clearly Grieve and company were hoping to do more.
An undeniable trend…
Both Adventure Beast and Midnight Gospel aired in 2020 and have been quietly in limbo with Netflix for some time now, with news of their disappearance only arriving in the last few days. But, Netflix’s commitment to animated projects is clearly on the wane.
Netflix’s director of creative leadership and original animation development, Phil Rynda, left the company in late April, and since then it’s been a bloodbath for planned and current projects.
Roald Dahl’s The Twits, which had been announced with great fanfare, was canceled, as were new series based on Jeff Smith’s beloved comic book series, Lauren Faust’s Bone, Toil and Trouble, and Wings Of Fire, which was being supervised by Ava DuVernay of Selma.
Meghan Markle’s animated epic Pearl, the first offering from Netflix’s extremely expensive partnership with the Duchess, was also canned.
Additionally, the streamer decided to shelve more education-oriented animated programming with Antiracist Baby, an animated series aimed at very young children, and With Kind Regards From Kindergarten, which was a film aimed at the same audience. Both projects were canceled before leaving development.
Netflix hasn’t done away with animation, mind you. Yesterday (June 9), the streamer announced a new animated version of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol (opens in new tab)a sequel to the festive animation Klaus and a film version of Richard Curtis’s children’s book That Christmas.
While all of these projects seem like surefire successes, we’ll have to keep an eye on their progress. After all, you’d think the influence of a real-life princess could put something in production, but Netflix had other plans…