Not even Meghan Markle can get a cartoon made at Netflix these days
No one is safe from Netflix's decision to gut its animated originals
Netflix had a difficult first quarter, losing billions of dollars in market value after failing to hit subscriber goals and quickly trying to put band-aids over the wound in the form of cracking down on password-sharing and announcing plans to start running ads, but there’s some good news: The streaming service has found the culprits responsible for it losing money, and they have all been dealt with swiftly and decisively.
We’re referring, of course, to the editorial staff of its fan site Tudum and everyone who was or was going to be making animated shows for the platform. That’s what the problem was, right? Not the absurd amount of money that Netflix spends on one or two big-name projects, leaving nothing but scraps for the original shows and movies that make up the bulk of its content? Okay, good.
Anyway, we’ve already heard a lot about animated shows getting the boot from Netflix, often with little or no warning, but just to hammer that in a little more, Deadline is reporting that even Meghan Markle, Duchess Of Sussex and wife of Prince Harry, can’t make a Netflix cartoon. Deadline says the streaming service has canceled Pearl, an animated series that she was developing through the Archewell Productions label that her and Harry set up in 2020.
The show, a family-oriented cartoon about a 12-year-old girl named Pearl, was going to be about its eponymous kid having some kind of adventure that involved being inspired by “a variety of influential women throughout history.” And now it’s not happening! Deadline says it was “still in the development stage,” so it must not have been very far along, but it’s still another seemingly important cartoon for the service that has been quietly killed off in the last few weeks.
Deadline also says that Netflix is reportedly rethinking some of its content strategy, suggesting that it may finally embrace “quality control and selectivity,” but at least the real danger of making cartoons and paying Tudum writers has been fixed.