cancellations are skyrocketing

Westworld, Hunters, The wonderful Mrs. Maiselthe Netflix adaptation of resident Evil that has barely lasted a season… 2022 has surely left more than one with their mouths open to the see how your favorite series, or that new one you had become hooked on, has suddenly become canceled.

There are cases and cases. The wonderful Mrs. Maisel It will close its cycle, with sorrows for many, but announcing its last season. Others like that of Westworld They have been much more abrupt, and the list of series that only last one season in streaming is getting longer and longer.

So far in 2022, according to data from Rotten Tomatoes, a total of 133 series have been cancelled. Last year there were 108 and the previous year 69. Why this radical increase?

Money has made streaming rise, and now it is making it go 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, putting productions in front of its subscribers to try to avoid casualties and continue growing. Nevertheless, In the current context of recession, this potato, which grew in the heat of money investments in search of gaining hegemony and profitability, may be close to going flat.. Netflix has been spending up to 17 billion a year on its own content, to get an idea.

Date of high on disney plus now and save thanks to the annual subscriptionwith which you can enjoy its entire catalog of series and films, access to the latest releasesto the catalog of stars and the best documentaries from National Geographic.

Disney announced at the beginning of November that its streaming service reported losses of 1,400 million dollars. So much for shareholders, who forced out Bob Chapek to return Bob Iger, who had reportedly stepped down just before the pandemic, as CEO.

Prime Video, for its part, has given up this year with many of what were its biggest bets after doing the rings of power, the most expensive series of all time. own Huntersstarring Al Pacino, Carnival Rowor the award-winning Maisel. The explanation seems to lie in something simple: the money that the platforms have invested up to now must be cut. Amazon, in particular, is going to derive part of its investment in audiovisuals – about 1,000 million – precisely to return to betting on big screen cinema after its acquisition of MGM.

Try Amazon Prime Video totally free for 30 days and enjoy the complete catalog of the platform without limits. Just by signing up you will have instant access to the best movies and series, as well as free shipping on amazon and other advantages.

HBO, in the midst of its merger with Discovery shortly after its rebrand, today is a box of surprises. Many of its films and original content have been disappearing from the platform, and the cessation of Westworld It is the greatest example that something is not quite right. At the time it was one of his spearheads.

What about Netflix? The red giant, with its own growth limit problems and its commitment to advertisements —something that many said it would not do— also generates and crushes titles without regard. You are unwilling or unable financially to stretch your best products anymore, stranger thingswhich will end in its fifth season, and other recent titles such as winx saga, the imperfect either file 81which had an apparent good reception, have been cut.

The opacity of the audience data on the platforms makes it impossible to know to what extent the comments on networks of certain series or their interest, for example in Google searches, later translates into real profitability.

The arrival of Peak TV?

As we mentioned, the increase in cancellations is almost normal considering how the proliferation of platforms has also increased the number of titles offered each year.

In fact, for almost a decade in hollywood is speculated with a term called Peak TV, coined by John Landgraf, president of the FX channel, back in 2015, when he believed that the industry was generating too many series for all of them to have their share of attention, largely due to the emergence of streaming platforms. It was creating, according to his analysis, a “entertainment bubble”.

Sign up for HBO Max and you will have access to the best series and exclusive movies What The Wire, the sopranos either Game of Thrones. Includes the entire Warner catalogue, Cartoon Network classics and major releases such as matrix Y Dune.

Perhaps Landgraf did not know then that two years later Disney was going to buy the entertainment arm of FOX, and he would be immersed as one more by-product of an even bigger conglomerate that would prepare Disney Plus, but his vision was summed up very clearly. : there were many series.

Specifically, this bubble is very clearly visualized when seeing that between 2012 and 2018 the number of new series shot up from 300 to more than 500. With another important turning point, which in 2018 was already the majority of those produced by video platforms. streaming.

But this number has reached another level in 2022 because 561 are already only those produced by Netflix, HBO and Disney together. This has been its evolution:

Series released by the main platforms in recent years

It is difficult to attribute more weight to the current context of crisis or to whether there really is fatigue after years of so much content, but the truth is that we can be ahead of a few years where the platforms reduce their number of releases and the spending they were investing up to now in them. The question is: will the subscribers follow?