Netflix's Terminator anime has been canceled

The writer/director hopped on social media this weekend to break the news about the show, which depicts what was going on in Japan during at least one iteration of the franchise’s recurring Judgment Day. In fact, it’s not actually clear when the cancellation happened: Tomlin was responding to a fan question about the show’s status when he revealed that, “It was cancelled. The critical and audience reception to it was tremendous, but at the end of the day not nearly enough people watched it. I would’ve loved to deliver on the Future War I had planned in season’s 2 and 3, but I’m also very happy with how it feels contained as is.” In other posts, Tomlin revealed that he’d already fully written a second season of the show, and had plans that stretched for a five-season run. He also spoke warmly of Netflix, including noting that they’d offered him two or three episodes in order to wrap up his story after the kill order was handed down, but that he’d declined in favor of letting the show’s current finale stand as its true ending.

We were among the outlets who were fairly positive on Terminator Zero, praising, in our review, its dedication to the franchise’s more philosophical side. Animated by Japanese studio Production I.G., the show’s English dub starred André Holland, Sonoyz Mizuno, and Rosario Dawson, with Timothy Olyphant as its resident Terminator. Noting that he’d love to someday return to the franchise in live action, Tomlin used his online post-mortem to attribute the show’s failure to at least a partial audience mismatch, writing, “Generally speaking, anime audiences skew younger. Terminator audiences skew older. Terminator Zero asked them to meet in the middle, and they didn’t in the way the corporation needed to justify the spend to continue. I’m extremely grateful to the people who have watched it.”