Why Westworld Just Got Cancelled
HBO just announced that the sci-fi series will not be getting a fifth season.
It's the end of the line for HBO's wild west sci-fi drama as the network announced that it was pulling the plug on Westworld.
The show, which premiered in 2016, was in the middle of a storyline pitting humanity against the robotic "hosts" when its cancellation was announced on the 4th November 2022.
This decision came after co-creator Jonathan Nolan said that he was hopeful that show would get its fifth and final season. So what went wrong for a show that had 54 Emmy nominations to its name
Firstly, the show's viewership has been on the decline for some time now. The first season was the most-viewed opening season for any HBO original show with an average of 1.8 million people watching per episode.
That number had fallen drastically by the fourth season with just 300,000 people tuning in.
According to Deadline, this is primarily the reason why the show has been shuttered. With a huge budget, it just didn't make sense to pump hundreds of millions of dollars into a show with a rapidly dwindling fanbase.
Secondly, HBO has just been taken over by Warner Bros. Discovery. The new parent company want to make big changes to the network and, with House of the Dragon just finishing and The Last of Us on its way, there just wasn't room in their plans for Westworld.
And thirdly, that most classic of all reasons, budget cuts played a huge part in why Westworld had to die. Warner recently announced a massive $3.5billion savings drive across the business and, with some pretty high production costs, the show was a prime candidate for cost-cutting.
The demise of Westworld leaves a huge hole in the TV landscape. It was one of the longest-standing prestige series still going and still had a lot to offer fans despite dwindling viewers.
The fact that its story will remain incomplete is utterly heart-breaking and just goes to show that, in the world of television, no show is ever truly safe.