Cowboy Bebop Live-Action Series Has Been Cancelled

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Cowboy Bebop, one of Netflix’s most ambitious projects for this year, has been shelved after extremely disappointing reviews came from fans. This move from the streaming platform comes just three weeks into the 19th November debut of the show on the streaming platform.

The space Western has had quite a terrible reception- and it was to be expected as it had some big shoes to fill. The 10-episode series garnered only 46% positive critics of Rotten Tomatoes. The fans of the anime argued with the rating, giving it a 56% positive audience score on the site.

Cowboy Bebop Crashes And Burns 

According to the Top 10 site of Netflix, Cowboy Bebop did manage to secure almost 74 million viewing hours throughout the world since it made its debut- so one can safely say it got some massive sampling out of the gate after which it went down by 59% for the week of Nov 29 to December 5.

Several insiders with the company have pointed out that the renewal rate for Netflix for scripted series that have two or more seasons have a reasonable rate of 60%, which is strictly in line with industry averages and similar to most renewal verdicts, the decision to shelve the series was quite well-thought of. 

Cowboy Bebop falls into the category of projects that Netflix tried to reinvent from Japanese anime as live-action which failed to take off. This includes  Dragonball Evolution, Ghost in the Shell, and Death Note. The only success for this category would be 2019’s Alita: Battle Angel which pulled in $319 million worldwide. 

The Cowboy Bebop series had a cast of John Cho, Mustafa Shakir, and Daniella Pineda, who played the role of three bounty hunters or cowboys- all trying to move on from their past. Most critics of the show though that the live-action series was faithful to the anime to a fault, but it failed to recreate the same ambiance that the anime did.