The news of the ambitious Netflix original 1899‘s cancellation is a shocking one. The high-profile mystery series was axed after just one season. The news was confirmed by the series co-creator Baran bo Odar. Sharing on his Instagram account, “We would have loved to finish this incredible journey with a second and third season as we did with ‘Dark.’ But sometimes things don’t turn out the way you planned. That’s life.”
Hello, I’m here to welcome you to capitalism. You’re obviously new, and don’t have a grasp yet on how it works. No worries, it’s a silly thing. You see, under capitalism, the goal is to make the most amount of money possible. Capitalists invest money (buying rights to shows, producing new shows), and hope to see a return on their investment (box office receipts, new viewers, retained viewers, etc.—tracking how many people watched, etc.)
In this scenario, Netflix paid out a lot of money for 1899, hoping that it would turn out to be a hit like Dark, but it didn’t grab viewers the way Dark did, and it cost a whole lot more money. This is what is known as a poor return on investment (ROI). Meanwhile, Knives Out made a lot of money, and sequels tend to perform better, so they snatched up the two sequels. Will it turn out to be a bad return on investment? Time will tell, but the film made $15 milly in a very limited release, and drove a lot of people to watch it, so it doesn’t look like a terrible idea so far. Likewise all the meh Ryan Reynolds movies.
Perhaps Netflix should never have given 1899 the budget it had, so that it could have survived lower viewership, or perhaps they never should have picked it up in the first place. The creators previous effort Dark is a work of art. Just to be clear, art and capitalism are not mutually opposed forces where one has to destroy the other.
Capitalism is not opposed to art at all. It LOVES art. You know, so far as it brings in money to “justify” itself. But art that plays in the big capitalism sandbox has demands. The show cost $65 million to produce, and it didn’t bring in enough money to justify that. That’s it. If a work of art costs a lot of money, but brings IN a lot of money, hell to the yes. If a work of art brings in a medium amount of money, but costs a small amount of money, heck yes. If, however, it costs a lot of money, but bring a mediocre amount back? It’s gone. If art wishes to escape the whims of capitalism, it must also escape the drives—this is why the avant-garde is almost exclusively done on the cheap. If art wants to thrive inside the whims of capitalism, that’s fine too, it just has to play within that rule-set. I felt like there were a lot of loose ends and places for 1899 to go and I would’ve kept watching it. However, everyone at Netflix bet dollars that it would return dollars, and lost that bet.