Is Westworld coming back? Fans of the HBO show just got some terrible news
It’s official: Warner Bros. is rebooting Michael Crichton’s 1973 Westworld movie. Aptly penning the script is David Koepp, who wrote 1993’s jurassic park and some of its sequels, making the upcoming reboot an thrilling prospect for long-time followers of the franchise — even when Steven Spielberg isn’t directing. But Koep and WB’s new endeavor begs the query: Where does this go away the 2016 HBO sequence?
Created by Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy, Westworld was a large success in its first season, feeling extra like excessive idea cinema than tv, which doubtless helped earn the sequence 22 Emmy nominations. Using Crichton’s futuristic theme park as a basis, Nolan and Joy explored identification, consciousness, free will, and the ethics of synthetic intelligence years earlier than ChatGPT made these conversations mainstream. Despite being positioned as HBO’s subsequent game of Thrones, Westworld steadily misplaced momentum with every passing season. By the finish of Season 4 in 2022, common viewership had reportedly failed by roughly 81% from the show’s first season, in line with Nielsen ratings.
The decline wasn’t completely shocking for anybody truly watching the show. Season 1 turned a cultural phenomenon via its mix of mystery-box storytelling and philosophical sci-fi, introducing viewers to the park’s company proprietor Delos, its enigmatic founders, and the more and more unstable relationship between humanity and the park’s synthetic “hosts.” But Westworld season 2 drew criticism for its fragmented timeline and more and more convoluted storytelling, and season 3 completely deserted the western setting for a glossy cyberpunk future centered on surveillance and algorithmic management. By season 4, Westworld was trying to merge each identities collectively in a dystopian future dominated by unshackled robots, however a lot of the viewers had already checked out. In a figurative sense, the hosts had lengthy since left the park — each inside the show and in the actual world watching it.
Mere months after the season 4 finale aired, HBO officially canceled Westworldhowever its erasure did not cease there. Warner Bros. Discovery eliminated the sequence from HBO Max in December 2022 (just 4 months after season 4 ended), shifting the sequence to ad-supported platforms, like Tubi and the Roku Channel. The transfer felt like WB wasn’t just canceling Westworld however dropping it straight into the recycling bin.
Its cancellation and elimination from Max is likely to be official sufficient for many exhibits, however that is Westworld we’re speaking about, one of HBO’s largest tentpoles of the 2010s. In an period the place legacy HBO properties proceed receiving revivals and spin-offs — like the Deadwood movie and The Sopranos prequel, The Many Saints of Newark — the chance of Nolan and Joy returning to complete the story has by no means totally dissipated.
In the lead-up to the premiere of falloutNolan even instructed The Hollywood Reporter that he nonetheless supposed to complete Westworld as initially deliberate. “Yes, 100%. We’re completionists,” he mentioned, including, “It took me eight years and a change of director to get Interstellar made. “We’d like to finish the story we started.” Four years after the sequence was cancelled, with its episodes nonetheless absent from Max and a wholly new Westworld film now in growth, these feedback really feel far much less hopeful than they as soon as did.
However, the irony should not be misplaced on Westworld followers. Despite WB’s many makes an attempt to erase Westworld In the previous, the firm nonetheless sees the worth in the franchise, worth that might not exist with out the 2016 sequence. Not even Warner appears totally succesful of shutting the park down for good. On one hand, the new film would possibly properly cement the incontrovertible fact that the 2016 show won’t ever get the violent ends it deserved. On the different hand, its revival proves the studio nonetheless sees a cause to spend money on the franchise.
Who is aware of? There’s all the time an opportunity Nolan and Joy would possibly ultimately get to complete the narrative they began. But for a sequence constructed on loops and repetition, maybe Westworld was by no means meant to flee its personal.
