Western world, Hunters, Lovely Mrs MaiselNetflix adaptation resident Evil which barely lasted a season… 2022 surely left more than one person with their mouths open for see how your favorite show or that new one you’ve been addicted to is suddenly canceled.
There are cases and cases. Lovely Mrs Maisel He will close his cycle, with sorrows for many, but announcing his final season. Others, like Western world They’ve gotten a lot edgier and the list of shows that only air for one season is getting longer and longer.
So far in 2022, according to rotten tomatoes, A total of 133 episodes were cancelled. Last year there were 108, and last year 69.. Why this radical increase?
Money raised streaming, now it’s taking it down
Logically, the greater the number of series and platforms, the greater the number of cancellations. The streaming market has been playing hot potato for years, offering products to its subscribers to try and avoid losses and continue to grow. Nonetheless, In the current recessionary conditions, this potato, which grew in the heat of cash investments in search of hegemony and profitability, may be close to collapse.. To put it mildly, Netflix spends up to $17 billion a year on its own content.
Disney announced in early November that its streaming service posted a $1,400 million loss.. So much for the shareholders who forced Bob Chapek to bring back Bob Iger, who reportedly stepped down as CEO shortly before the pandemic.
Prime Video, for its part, has dropped many of its biggest bets this year. after execution rings of power, the most expensive series of all time. own Huntersstarring Al Pacino carnival rowor award-winning Meisel. The explanation seems to lie in something simple: the money the platforms have invested so far needs to be cut. Amazon, in particular, is about to divest part of its investment in audiovisuals – about 1,000 million – precisely in order to return to betting on widescreen cinemas after the acquisition of MGM.
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HBO in the midst of a merger with Discovery shortly after the rebrand., today is a box of surprises. Many of his films and original content are disappearing from the platform, and the cessation Western world This is the best example that something is wrong. At that time it was one of his forward detachments.
How about Netflix? The red giant, with its own growth-limiting issues and advertising commitment – which many think it won’t – also generates and represses titles recklessly. You are unwilling or financially unable to further expand your best products, weird thingswhich will end in the fifth season, and other recent games such as winx saga, imperfect or file 81which had an apparent good reception were cut.
The opacity of audience data on the platforms makes it impossible to know to what extent comments on the networks of certain series or their interest, for example in Google search, are later translated into real profit.
The advent of Peak TV?
As we mentioned, an increase in cancellations is almost normal considering how the proliferation of platforms also increases the number of games offered each year.
In fact, for almost a decade in Hollywood speculated by a term called Peak TV, invented by John Landgraf, President of Channel FX back in 2015, when he thought the industry produced too many shows for all of them to get their fair share of attention, largely due to the rise of streaming platforms. This created, according to his analysis, “fun bubble”.
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Landgraf may not have known then that two years later, Disney was going to buy FOX’s entertainment division and it would be shipped as another spin-off of an even larger conglomerate that Disney Plus would prepare, but his vision was summed up very clearly. : There were a lot of episodes.
In particular, this bubble is very clearly visualized if you see that between 2012 and 2018 the number of new series has grown from 300 to more than 500. With another important turning point, which in 2018 already constituted the majority of those produced by video platforms . .
But this number has reached another level in 2022 because 561 has already been produced by Netflix, HBO and Disney together.. This was his evolution:
Series released on major platforms in recent years
| Year | Netflix | HBO | Disney |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2019 | 175 | 24 | eight |
| 2020 | 257 | 81 | 32 |
| 2021 | 311 | 110 | 39 |
| 2022 | 337 | 156 | 68 |
It’s hard to place more weight on the current context of the crisis, or whether there really is fatigue after years of this amount of content, but the truth is that we can get ahead of the game in a few years as platforms reduce the number of releases and the costs they’ve invested in them so far. The question is, will subscribers follow?
