An eight-episode season of television that cost a reported $200 million to produce is essentially required to draw in strong reviews and massive viewership numbers to justify its own existence, and that unfortunately wasn’t the case for Netflix’s Jupiter’s Legacy, which was canceled less than a month after it premiered.
On Rotten Tomatoes, the superhero saga holds a middling 38% score, but audiences did at least rate it at a substantially higher 72%. Not only that, but recently released data from the Nielsen streaming ratings showed that the service’s first Millarworld project was the second most-watched original title across every major platform in the week it debuted behind only The Mitchells vs. the Machines, despite Jupiter’s Legacy being eligible for just three of those seven days.
Those are decent returns in a microcosm, but clearly it wasn’t enough to convince the Netflix hierarchy to continue investing such huge sums of money into the blockbuster saga. Leading man Josh Duhamel appears to have taken the news in his stride, but co-star Andrew Horton has reacted to it with a statement released on social media that makes clear how upset he is.
“Jupiter’s Legacy was a once in a lifetime experience and one I will never forget. I’m sad and sorry that we don’t get to continue this journey. I feel as though we had barely scratched the surface with this one, but as the inimitable Jim Carrey once said, ‘That’s the way the cookie crumbles’.
A huge thank you to every single person involved in this titan of a project; we should be incredibly proud of what we created, regardless of the outcome. Thank you to @netflix for the opportunity. Thank you to @mrmarkmillar for creating Jupiter’s Legacy. Thank you to Steven DeKnight for taking a chance on a nobody. Thank you to everyone who has watched the show.”
It’s got to be a bummer for Horton, who was being set up as the driving force behind season 2 of Jupiter’s Legacy and the catalyst for a superpowered family feud. The actor’s Brandon Sampson was going to be caught in the crossfire between nefarious uncle Walter and overbearing dad Sheldon, with the former’s Brainwave looking to take his lifelong grudge against the latter’s Utopian to the next level by trying to turn son against father with what would have presumably been catastrophic consequences for the Sampson family, the Union of Justice and public perception of superheroes in general.
