In today's era of streaming, it feels like no show is truly safe. Just this week we got the news that Disney+ had canceled its Star Wars show The Acolyte barely a month after it finished airing; before that, Prime Video took the axe to its popular fantasy romance series My Lady Jane.
But for me, looking back on the many casualties of the streaming wars, few losses sting more than Raised By Wolves. Created by Aaron Guzikowski and produced by Ridley Scott, Raised By Wolves was a daring, weird science fiction series about a pair of androids named Mother (Amanda Collin) and Father (Abubakar Salim) who undertook a dangerous mission to restart humanity on the distant planet of Kepler-22b after the Earth was all but destroyed. It quickly carved out a passionate fanbase, tapping into the sort of shocking sci-fi horror vibes that Scott was known for from movies like Alien and Prometheus.
Despite being one of HBO Max's most-watched original series during the early months after the streamer's launch, Wolves was canceled after the ending of its second season in 2022. It was obvious that this wasn't a planned ending; season 2 left off with a number of major cliffhangers. Adding insult to injury, the series was then removed from the Max streaming service during the content purges under Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav. The idea was that Raised By Wolves would become available on FAST streaming services, but don't ask me where to find it because at this point I genuinely don't know.
Given its abrupt cancelation, it's no surprise that Raised By Wolves fans have kept the hope alive that we'd one day see some sort of continuation to the series. They've even gone so far as to rent a billboard in Times Square beseeching other streaming services to save the series. As of yet, those efforts haven't borne any fruit...but that doesn't mean more Raised By Wolves isn't on people's minds.
As for its leads, both Salim and Collin recently made the jump to another HBO series: the Game of Thrones prequel House of the Dragon. Salim plays the Sea Snake Corlys Velaryon's (Steve Toussaint) first mate and bastard son Alyn of Hull. Salim did quite a lot of interviews during the run of House of the Dragon's second season...and in one of them he revealed his idea for reviving Raised By Wolves.
Could Raised By Wolves return as a video game?
Speaking to The Hollywood Reporter following the airing of House of the Dragon season 2's penultimate episode, "The Red Sowing," THR slipped Salim a question about Raised By Wolves, asking what it would take to bring back the series. "I don’t know, man," Salim replied. "I keep saying, I could turn this into a video game. Just let me do it! Let me do it!" The actor entertained the prospect of Raised By Wolves being revived in other mediums as well, like anime or even a tabletop roleplaying game.
The idea of Salim making a video game out of Raised By Wolves doesn't come out of nowhere. Beyond his work as an actor on screen, Salim is also pretty well known in the video game world. He provided the voice acting for Bayek of Siwa in Assassin's Creed Origins and has since gone on to found his own game development studio, Surgent Studios. This year, Surgent Studios released their first game, Tales of Kenzera: ZAU, which draws on Salim's own life experience of losing his father to tell a moving tale about a young man coping with a difficult loss by reading the story of a shaman seeking to save his own father's spirit.
Tales of Kenzera: ZAU was an excellent game, especially thanks to its strong storytelling and voice performances by the likes of Salim and fellow House of the Dragon actor Steve Toussaint. If Raised by Wolves ever were turned into a video game, it would be an enormous plus to have someone like Salim involved.
As of right now, nothing official has been announced for a continuation of Raised By Wolves. But whether it will one day return as a video game, a comic, or something else, I hope that fans will eventually be able to witness the ending to the story that creator Aaron Guzikowski had planned.
Until then...well, you can't watch Raised By Wolves on Max, and I have no idea where in the digital ether it's currently living. Fortunately, the series is available on Blu-ray; that way you can add it to your shelf and no penny-pinching TV execs can take it away from you.
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