Scott Pilgrim Takes Off – Cr. COURTESY OF NETFLIX © 2023
After a year of waiting, Scott Pilgrim fans finally got an update on the fate of their show, and it’s not good. After only a single season, Scott Pilgrim Takes Off will not return to Netflix for a season 2.
In development in some form or another since 2018, and with a green light from Netflix and Universal Content Productions in 2020, Scott Pilgrim Takes Off serves as a spin-off to the comics and the movie. All the main cast from that Edgar Wright movie return to reprise their roles. Told over eight episodes, the show comes from creators Bryan Lee O’Malley and BenDavid Grabinski.
Malley announced the cancellation on X on November 20th, writing, “It’s been one year since Scott Pilgrim Takes Off came out. It was an honor to work with all of the cast and staff around the world. It was like conducting a symphony orchestra every day. From the moment BenDavid Grabinski sparked the idea, the project felt like a one-of-a-kind miracle.”
He continued, “Anyway, we were recently informed that the show will NOT return. As you know, we only intended one season, and called in a lot of favors to make it happen, so making more would have been nearly impossible. Still, I know some of you have been holding out hope.”
“Sorry to all Matthew fans and Gideon fans, I know you will suffer the most,” O’Malley concluded.
This won’t come as a huge surprise to those who have been reading What’s on Netflix for any length of time. We wrote in late November 2023 that the show was unlikely to return, where we cited the viewing figures and comments from people involved in the show being less than optimistic that they’d be returning.
The show received ample marketing (some online will probably disagree with me on this), with Netflix’s SEO blog TUDUM posting many articles promoting it and plenty of social media posts, plus ample press releases and coverage from trades and other outlets.
With animated titles, if you don’t hear about renewal within the first few months of releasing, it’s probably not coming back for additional seasons, given the investment in time required to get animated productions running. Most animated titles at least get a big upfront order of typically two seasons (see Tomb Raider for this), or if you’re really lucky, like Blue Eye Samurai, you can get renewed a few months after premiering.
How well did Scott Pilgrim Takes Off perform on Netflix?
Thanks to Netflix, we can get a good picture of how well the show performed (we can also look at a few external sources!). Let’s begin with the main global weekly top 10s, where the show only appeared for one week before dropping out. That week was November 19th to November 26th, when it ranked seventh in the TV English charts, picking up 7.4M hours watched, equating to 2M views.
Expanding out with help from the Netflix Engagement Reports, the show was the 287th in the period it was released, picking up 22.5M hours watched, equating to 6.1M views. In the first half of 2024, that dropped to 5.9M hours watched and 1.6M views. When we compare that against Blue Eye Samurai, which did get renewed, that show picked up 73.5M hours watched in the back half of 2023, equating to 11.6M views, and 36.4M hours watched in the first half of 2024, equating to 5.7M views.
Drilling down into the daily top 10s, we know the series featured in the top 10s in 36 countries, with the US seeing the show appear for seven days before dropping out. Some of the biggest countries for the show were Chile and Mexico (14 and 10 days in the top 10, respectively).
Are you disappointed that Scott Pilgrim Takes Off will not return for a second season on Netflix? Let us know in the comments.