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The timing of TV cancellations can be a funny thing. More often than not, they arrive in the immediate aftermath of what will turn out to be a show’s final season, sometimes trapping series in unexpected cliffhangers. Occasionally, they come before that finale airs, leading to an awkward Dead Man Walking sort of thing where the series trudges for its last few episodes toward its date with death. And every once in a while, they seem to come way after everybody, including, presumably, the people whose job it was to publicly cancel the show, have already forgotten it was even airing.
Take Disney+’s Goosebumps series, which aired its second season back in January of 2025, seven whole months ago. Only now, though, has the streamer come out and said it’s killing off the anthology series, which attempted to make something a bit meatier out of R.L. Stine’s classic collection of childhood chillers. Variety confirmed the news earlier today, including the fact that Sony Pictures Television is attempting to shop the show around for a third season somewhere else.
It seems, on the surface, like a pretty easy sell: With their “one big story, built out of a bunch of smaller Goosebumps tales” structure, each season of Goosebumps was a standalone entity, each featuring one recognizable adult actor (Justin Long for the first season, David Schwimmer for the second) anchoring a cast of monster-bait teens. The show attempted to build up a little bit of that Stranger Things heat for itself, telling long-term stories about abductions, conspiracies, and hauntings, albeit without ever catching the same amount of attention as the Netflix show. Still, reviews were middling-to-good, even if overall enthusiasm seemed to drop pretty sharply between the two seasons. (The absence of readily available streaming data from Disney always makes this stuff tricky to track, but looking at things like “How many professional critics reviewed the second season vs. the first?” shows a 70 percent drop in critical notices.)
Goosebumps was co-developed by Rob Letterman, who previously directed the 2015 live-action Goosebumps movie. The TV show grew out of downtime during the COVID-19 lockdowns, with its first season arriving on Disney+ back in 2023.
