Less than a month after the debut of Jupiter’s Legacy, Netflix announced that they would be cancelling their adaptation of the Mark Millar comic series. While some assumed that diminished viewership was to blame, Nielsen released a report that placed Jupiter’s Legacy at the top of the original series streaming charts for May 3-9. With 696 million minutes of viewing time, the series bested shows such as The Handmaid’s Tale, Star Wars: The Bad Batch, and even Netflix’s own Shadow and Bone.
A new report from THR has shed a little light into the reasoning behind the cancellation of Jupiter’s Legacy, and it seems that the writing might have been on the wall since the very beginning. Jupiter’s Legacy was originally developed under showrunner Steven DeKnight, who had asked Netflix for a budget of around $12 million per episode. However, Netflix forced him to accept a budget of $9 million per episode, but it wasn’t long before the series was plagued with delays and ran over-budget anyway. Knight then departed the series half-way through due to “creative differences” and was replaced by Sang Kyu Kim. Once production on the first season had wrapped, Netflix brought in Louis Leterrier as a consultant during the lengthy post-production period, but by that point, costs had ballooned to what sources say was over $200 million. Not exactly a small chunk of change. In addition to the budgetary problems, the Netflix executive who greenlit the series in the first place exited the company and was replaced. The new executive naturally scrutinized any project they themselves hadn’t greenlit, and one insider told THR that, “Unless the show is an undisputed hit, it’s going to fall under the microscope.“
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As we know, Netflix have tried to downplay the cancellation of Jupiter’s Legacy, only saying that they had released the cast from their commitments and that the show wouldn’t be continuing as an ongoing series. The series will be replaced by an adaptation of Mark Millar’s Supercrooks, which does mix with the world of Jupiter’s Legacy. The project is still in the early stages so it’s not yet clear if any characters from Jupiter’s Legacy will cross over. The series will follow a “rag-tag gang of supervillains, con-artists, petty thieves and leg-breakers who all band together for the heist of the century and the most outrageous crime story you’ve ever seen in your life.“
