Manifest seasons 1 and a couple of are lighting up the Netflix top 10s since their arrival on Netflix in both the US and Canada on June 10th, 2021. With NBC and its streaming service Peacock passing on the show, fans pinned their hopes on Netflix reviving the show for season 4 although now that’s been ruled out. Here’s a glance on why.
Just a fast recap if you’ve not been following along.
Manifest is an NBC show that’s produced and distributed by Warner Brothers Television. The show first aired back in 2018 and three seasons later, the show was canceled by NBC.
As we first reported, Netflix was learning the show as a licensed title within the US and Canada on June 10th. The third season’s finale was released on an equivalent day it had been added to Netflix and just four days later was when the show was officially canceled.
That led to a huge fan campaign to “#SaveManifest” and since Netflix had licensed the primary two seasons, they were no 1 on the shortlist to revive the show.
Deadline’s Nellie Andreeva then reported on June 18th that Netflix was, in fact, watching the likelihood of reviving before just three days later, announcing that Netflix had passed on the show.
So the question becomes, why did Netflix expire the show? Here are a couple of reasons that we expect .
Why Netflix Passed on Manifest
Just to caveat before we dig in further, this is often not the official line. It’s simply speculation.
As Julia Alexander’s post on IGN states, Netflix hasn’t been known for saving shows for a short time . There’s a bunch of reasons for this but there are three we suspect for being the case with Manifest.
First and foremost is cost. While we don’t have specifics on Manifest’s costs, we all know that it does play a key role. Additionally , because the show would still be licensed intrinsically , Netflix would eventually need to hand over the rights to all or any of the seasons (and previous seasons) it pays for exclusively (see The Killing as an honest example for that). Long term, Netflix needs/is moving towards in-house projects to carry on to rights for much longer .
International rights would have also been a sticky point. After all, Netflix features a lot of regions to serve and it only managed to license the primary two seasons within the US and Canada. Could other purchasers of the rights internationally made life difficult for Netflix holding back the primary few seasons? An honest example of this for Lucifer was the fact Amazon Prime video still holds exclusive rights in Germany for all seasons and therefore the first few seasons within the UK.
Manifest netflix june 2021
Lastly, Netflix’s internal data (not Nielsen or the highest 10 data) could’ve shown that the show wasn’t sticky enough (people didn’t watch all the thanks to the top or many people dropped out early). Additionally , TV ratings for the show continued to dwindle throughout season 3. It reportedly bled on the brink of 1,000,000 viewers within the final season. Season 1 peaked at 18.40 million viewers whereas the finale for season 3 was only 4.62 million.
As the IGN post states, Netflix’s objectives are key to understanding what they’re doing moving forward. In our view, licensing Manifest was simply to plug a rather depleted TV content slate because of the COVID-19 pandemic causing havoc on productions.
Can Manifest be revived outside of Netflix?
Whether the show can now be renewed outside of Netflix seems unlikely. The seeming last-minute license to Netflix could’ve been a last-ditch effort and therefore the creator of the show on Twitter seemingly put out a final word on the show being done.
Our biggest question remains on why HBO Max passed. After all, they’re within an equivalent organization as Warner Brothers Television. Did they know something others didn’t?