The live-action Cowboy Bebop is no more, and that breaks my heart.
According to a report which hit the western entertainment website The Hollywood Reporter in the evening hours of December 9th, Netflix has canceled the series after one season only three weeks after its initial debut on the streaming service.
In the report, the reason given for the cancellation is that the streaming giant was weighing costs versus viewership. And to be fair, that’s a very legit reason to cancel the series that so many people were initially curious about before the public at large deemed the series to be a dumpster fire. The viewing public branded the series only 56% fresh on Rotten Tomatoes and gave it a 6.8 rating on IMDB.
Meanwhile, on my personal social media feeds, it was very hard to walk very far without finding someone who had something negative to say about the series. I vividly recall the early reviews being posted to various websites with almost all of them tearing the series apart for a variety of reasons, but in the end, it really just boiled down to the fact that no one felt like the cast or crew really understood the original source material and that was the death knell.
That isn’t to say that people didn’t give this series a chance as THR pointed out that the series received over 74 million hours of viewing time when it first premiered but word of mouth quickly caught up with it and caused that number to drop drastically within only a couple of weeks.
While I was one of the dozen or so people on the planet who actually enjoyed the live-action Cowboy Bebop, I am but one person with no real authority or influence so I guess I get to just chalk this up as “something I watched once upon a time”.
Source: The Hollywood Reporter