Yet another big budget and effects-heavy fantasy series has bitten the dust at Netflix, following the news that Arthurian retelling Cursed has been canceled after a single season. Admittedly, there have been rumors flying around for a while that we wouldn’t be seeing Katherine Langford’s Nimue again, but it’s now become official.
On the other side of the coin, though, there was talk as far back as last summer that it would actually end up being renewed, after it exploded in popularity to become the most popular scripted show on the entire platform. However, it appears as though the interest didn’t justify the investment, with Cursed also reported to be a very costly show given the lavish production design and heavy reliance on CGI to power the fantastical spectacle.
Based on the illustrated novel by Frank Miller and Tom Wheeler, Langford drew plenty of praise for her central turn, while the ever-reliable and underrated Vikings alum Gustaf Skarsgard walked away with every scene he was in thanks to his charismatically bizarre interpretation of Merlin. The threat of cancellation had been looming in the background for a while, as we fast approached the one-year anniversary of the Cursed‘s debut without so much as a peep from Netflix as to what the future may or may not hold.
It’s now become the latest in a rapidly expanding list of shows to have been thrown onto the scrapheap so far in 2021, and there’s no doubt more to come. At least enough time has passed between the first season debuting and now for fans to have had plenty of time to brace themselves for the confirmation that Cursed would be the latest one-and-done effort from Netflix‘s TV division.