Despite being the industry’s premiere streaming service with a seemingly unassailable lead in a rapidly-expanding market when it comes to sheer subscriber numbers, Netflix show no signs of slowing down as far as churning out original content goes. In fact, recent months have seen the company on an impressive winning streak of acclaimed movies and TV shows, so it shouldn’t come as a surprise to hear that their latest effort is once again capturing the public’s imagination.
Cursed seems like it was precision-engineered in the boardroom to draw in the widest audience possible, with 13 Reasons Why star Katherine Langford in the lead role headlining a female-driven spin on the King Arthur legend, all wrapped up as the family-friendly alternative to their other big fantasy series The Witcher, which spent months as the most popular TV show on the planet.
Their plan seems to have worked, too, with Cursed already generating huge buzz among subscribers that binged the entire run of episodes when it landed yesterday, and it also seems to be faring pretty well with critics based on the 72% Rotten Tomatoes score and 57 rating on Metacritic. Not everyone is quite so taken with it based on the 52% audience rating on RT from 128 reviews, but it at least marks a vast improvement on the disaster that was Guy Ritchie’s King Arthur: Legend of the Sword.
Cursed looks set to be the latest Netflix original to dominate their most-watched list and we’ve now heard from our sources – the same ones that told us Extraction would be getting a sequel before it was officially announced – that a second season has been ordered up already, as the streaming site is confident they have a hit on their hands and now plan to bring us more.
With The Witcher, Warrior Nun and now Cursed, Netflix are clearly embracing the fantasy genre in a big way, and despite the huge costs required to bring these effects-heavy stories to life, it looks as though the company’s latest hit original series has proven to be worth the investment just 24 hours after it was released.
