Apple TV+ has canceled Time Bandits after just one season.
Variety reports that the live action adaptation of Terry Gilliam’s 1981 cult classic will not see a Season 2.
Time Bandits, helmed by Taika Waititi, sees Lisa Kudrow’s Penelope lead a “crack team of expert thieves” through time and space, hijacking history with the help of a young boy named Kevin (Kal-El Tuck), who steps through his wardrobe Narnia-style and finds himself transported to the past before embarking on more adventures with the ragtag group.
The 10-episode series premiered its first two episodes on Apple TV+ on July 24, followed by two episodes each week through August 21. But it failed to find an audience, and now, Apple has called time.
IGN’s Time Bandits review returned a 5/10. We said: “The comic minds behind What We Do in the Shadows sand all the dark edges off of Terry Gilliam’s cult classic.”
Apple TV+ is the home of flashy sci-fi and fantasy series such as Silo, Foundation, and Severance, but it faces tough questions over the commercial realities of such high-quality and high-cost programming without the audience scale of the likes of Netflix and Prime Video. Apple raised the price of Apple TV+ in the U.S. to $9.99 a month from $6.99 a month in the fall of 2023 amid the increasingly costly streaming wars.
A July Bloomberg report said Apple is spending billions of dollars a year on original programming that has received strong reviews and many awards nominations, but its streaming service is attracting just 0.2% of TV viewing in the U.S. Apple TV+ generates less viewing in one month than Netflix does in one day, Bloomberg said.
Wesley is the UK News Editor for IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.
