Why was Westworld cancelled?

Westworld has run its final loop. HBO shocked fans last week by announcing the cancellation of the prestige science fiction drama after its fourth season. The news hit all the harder because Westworld creators Lisa Joy and Jonathan Nolan had been extremely transparent for quite some time about having a set end point for Westworld in mind; as late as season 4, Joy insisted that the show needed a fifth season to tell the full story they’d always envisioned.

Now, that chance has been snatched away, and it’s leaving some questioning the nature of their reality.

Why did HBO cancel Westworld? From what we can glean, the answer may be simpler than you might think.

Why was Westworld canceled?

When Westworld first debuted on HBO in 2016, it was held up as one of the network’s successors to Game of Thrones, a glitzy, highly-produced genre epic with great special effects, acting, and storytelling. However, the show has had a lot of ups and downs. Season 2 featured a lot of great moments (including “Kiksuya,” one of the best episodes of the show period), but it also foreshadowed deeper problems by getting lost in its own convoluted mythology.

People noticed and stopped watching as intently. This drop-off in viewers increased when the show’s third season hit in 2020; that season averaged under one million viewers per episode. Season 3 was always going to be a make-or-break year for Westworld; it was when the android “hosts” finally escaped the titular theme park. Unfortunately, their adventures in the outside world didn’t quite land with viewers.

That brings us to this year’s season 4, which pulled in less than half the viewership of season 3, which was already down quite a lot from the show’s first two seasons. Westworld is a big, complicated, expensive show to make. Despite season 4 improving of season 3, it was too little too late to win back fans.

There’s also the recent Warner Media-Discovery merger to consider. As a result of these two huge companies combining, new Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav has cut back on content. The Hollywood Reporter’s insiders maintain that the decision to cancel Westworld was not part of that, but it’s impossible to be certain it wasn’t at least a factor.

Either way, it seems that for now we’ve seen the last of Dolores Abernathy and the other hosts. Here’s hoping that the new world she created in her final moments of season 4 ends up being better than the bloodsoaked place they left behind.

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