For the past several weeks, we've been hearing a lot of cancellation news of several beloved Netflix shows such as 1899, Warrior Nun, the Resident Evil series, and many more. As fans are petitioning for the decisions to be reversed, the streamer finally broke their silence and defended their controversial move.
Speaking recently with Bloomberg, Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos explained why the shows were canceled and iterated that they had a small audience and the big budget that they spent didn't justify the expenses made in producing the shows.
"A lot of these shows were well-intended but talk to a very small audience on a very big budget," he said. "The key to it is you have to be able to talk to a small audience on a small budget and a large audience at a large budget. If you do that well, you can do that forever."
Sarandos cited the hit award-winning Korean series Squid Game as an example of an original show that became very successful on the streamer and justified the need of getting renewed for another season as well as spinoff projects.
He continued, "It is very rare that a show like Squid Game from Korea would be as global as it was. Within 30 hours, the world was watching Squid Game with no human intervention to try to market Squid Game to the world."
"We're just getting started to make Squid Game not an unusual thing, but basically something that happens literally every week," co-CEO Greg Peters also added.
Sarandos also compared the streamer as equal to the other well-known and beloved cable networks in terms of the library programming that is available for the subscribers to watch.
"You used to have to hunt through 500 channels of cable to find them all and now they're gonna be on Netflix," he said.
"The measure of quality is, if you love a dating show, make it as good as The Ultimatum, make it as good as Love is Blind. There's no difference in prestige quality television in each of these genres as long as they're well executed.
Based on the CEOs' comments, it sounds like they have no regrets about their decisions, and the shows will remain canceled despite the overwhelming social media campaigns clamoring for them to reverse it. For now, let's just hope that the remaining beloved current shows on the streamer will not get the same fate.
Also Read: Fans Are Outraged At Netflix Claiming They “Never” Cancel Successful Shows
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