The unpredictable nature of Netflix’s renewal strategy has continued, with the streaming service handing out one of its fastest-ever renewals to Castlevania: Nocturne, which only premiered eight days ago.
Critics have been exceptionally kind to the video game adaptation, which currently boasts a perfect 100 percent score on Rotten Tomatoes, but that doesn’t quite tell the whole story. Over a thousand users have weighed in with their two cents to bring its audience average down to just 45 percent, and the ratings haven’t been all that great, either.
On its first week on the platform, Nocturne only managed to sneak onto the Top 10 for English-language TV shows in eighth place after notching an estimated 2.6 million views and 9.8 million hours watched, which makes it all the more surprising that season 2 has been given the okay in such rapid fashion.
Picking up after the original Castlevania series that also aired exclusively on Netflix, it’s clear that somebody in a position of power has a soft spot for the long-running franchise and all of its associated vampiric lore, because a little over a week to be renewed is virtually unheard of in all of streaming, not just the company that doubled down on Nocturne so quickly.
Apparently, underwhelming viewership and a middling response from the people who did watch it doesn’t mean a thing in the short or long term, with countless originals still biding their time to discover their respective fates, all while a brand new series that’s little over a week old has already been granted a stay of execution.
