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Is Netflix doing a season 2 of Cowboy Bebop?

Netflix cancelled Cowboy Bebop just a month after its first season premiered, which means that the show will no longer be getting a second season.

Netflix’s live action remake of the Cowboy Bebop anime got off to a rocky start. After several delays, fans were sceptical of whether the series would be any good.

To make matters worse, Netflix decided to cancel the show only a few days after its first season finally started airing, likely because it was just not amassing enough viewers.

Cowboy Bebop’s rocky start

There is no denying that Netflix has created some of the most popular original shows out of all the streaming services, including hits like Stranger ThingsOuter Banks, and You. But Netflix’s venture into live-action remakes has not gone as smoothly.

Netflix’s remake of the Cowboy Bebop anime was mostly met with scepticism when it was first announced.

Moreover, the various production delays on the show, including a nine-month production, due to an unfortunate and accidental on-set injury, certainly did not help to foster any kind of confidence in the show.

Is Netflix doing a season 2 of Cowboy Bebop?

Unfortunately, though the first season of Cowboy Bebop did end up being released on Netflix in 2021, it was cancelled shortly thereafter.

In the show’s defence, the production team certainly did their best to capture as much of the original Cowboy Bebop magic as possible in the reboot.

In fact, they even consulted with Shinichiro Watanabe, who was the director of the anime and brought the original Cowboy Bebop composer, Yoko Kanno, on-board to do the sound and music for the series.

However, none of this seemed to be enough and the official word that Netflix would not be moving forward with the series came just one month after the first season’s premiere.

Cowboy Bebop was originally meant to have multiple seasons, and it seems as though this cancellation not only shocked fans of the show, but the cast as well.

John Cho, who portrayed Spike Spiegel in the series, revealed that his family moved to New Zealand, where the show was filmed, so that he could be part of it, only for it to be cancelled so quickly.

Netflix does not release official viewership numbers for its shows. However, based on what Lucas Shaw learned through his investigation on the internal metrics that Netflix uses to decide whether they should cancel or renew shows in 2021, it is evident that Cowboy Bebop’s viewership probably just did not give the platform a big enough return on their investment for them to sign off on another season.

What did the cast have to say about Cowboy Bebop’s cancellation?

It is safe to say that Cowboy Bebop’s quick cancellation came as a big shock to its creators.

In fact, Javier Grillo-Marxuach, the show’s co-executive producer, teased all of the things that the creators were planning for the series in the future, just before its cancellation was announced.

He tweeted: “I wish we could make what we planned for a second season, but you know what they say, men plan, god laughs.”

Cho, who played the starring role in the series, also lamented its cancellation, stating that he had put a lot of his life into the show and was “bummed” that it got cancelled so soon.

How did fans react to the news of Cowboy Bebop’s cancellation?

Cowboy Bebop may have mere been a blimp on Netflix’s top ten lists when it was eventually released on the platform, but the series did manage to impress some fans before it was cancelled.

These fans, who were devastated by the news that the show would not continue, even started a Change.org petition to get Netflix to reconsider their decision. The petition currently has over 150,000 signatures.

Is there a chance that Cowboy Bebop could be picked up again in the future?

While even Cho noticed the efforts of fans who desperately wanted Cowboy Bebop to be renewed for more seasons, and the creators of the show certainly have ideas for some future plotlines, it seems unlikely that Netflix would ever decide to bring back the series in the future.

The first season of Cowboy Bebop reportedly started off strong with a total of 74 million viewing hours over the course of the first three weeks that the show was available on the platform. However, after this, the show’s viewership dropped by about 59 percent.

When this sharp drop in viewership is paired with the overall lukewarm response to the series, it also seems unlikely that any other Network or streaming service would want to pick up the show in the future.

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