HBO surprised us all on Friday by announcing the cancellation of ‘Westworld’. It is true that it had lost audience, but also that the plan was always to do five seasons and cancel it at the end of the fourth did not sit well with fans of the series. Now it has also been discovered that Warner is going to lose between 10 and 15 million dollars by not doing it.
For what is this
The reason for this disbursement is that HBO renewed the contracts of the actors before the fourth season came to premiere. It is a common process to be able to ensure their participation in future deliveries, but in this case it has backfired and they will have to pay all of them despite the fact that they are not going to shoot any episodes.
It is seen that in HBO they have thrown numbers and even it compensated them to lose money to do it. Taking into account that each episode of the fourth season cost around 10 million dollars, it can be interpreted both as a millionaire loss and as a way to reduce losses. It’s hard to see it like this, but it is what it is.
Also, Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy, creators of the series, reached an agreement with Amazon a long time ago, as a result of which we are already being able to see ‘The Peripheral’, a series that is sweeping Prime Video -it was the first to dethrone ‘The Lord of the Rings’: The rings of power’-. For this reason, the additional factor of keeping them happy so that they would not leave did not come into play.
Of course, Deadline reveal that the reason for its cancellation is due to the same policy that Netflix has been exercising for a long time: the relationship between number of viewers and cost. ‘Westworld’ was a very expensive series, so the decline in its popularity -the first season averaged 1.8 million viewers on HBO, a figure that went down with each new installment until bottoming out with 0.3 in the fourth- has been decisive.