HBO cancels ‘Westworld’ after four seasons, thwarting creators’ hopes for a fifth
Westworld had a lot of its future in jeopardy Wednesday when HBO cancelled the series, four days after the debut season finale.
The show, starring Evan Rachel Wood as a “host” who becomes hostess to guests at a virtual amusement park, made waves last fall when it introduced robots, including android hosts, to human guests. The drama depicts a future in which humans can travel between the real and the fictional worlds inside a technologically advanced amusement park — the future of “the Westworld” of Stephen King novels, of course.
“As soon as we learned that the pilot was not going to be picked up, we made plans to go forward. We’ll be moving forward,” Wood said Wednesday, according to The Hollywood Reporter.
Wood, who plays “Westworld’s” host in the first season, was not available to comment on the cancellation. “We are disappointed by this decision,” she wrote on Twitter. “We have built a strong relationship with the fans and we will be resuming our Westworld journey in the fall.”
This marks the fourth time the show has been canceled. It was canceled after two seasons in 2004, after 13, and again after four. In 2015, HBO made a deal with the show’s showrunner, Lisa Joy, to make Westworld a show that was “more than just a single season,” HBO said at the time.
“Our entire strategy was to make the show a series,” Joy said. So she, with co-creator Jonathan Nolan, would “take a risk and do a pilot that would feel as if it belonged in a series and not an instant-run movie.”
The show began with HBO giving the show a seven-episode order. But then HBO decided to make a pilot available in July 2017 in order to “make the show feel more like a show” and would offer a second season, “if they could actually pull it together,” Joy said at the time.
At the time, Joy said she was “100 percent confident” the show was going to be picked up, but then, according to The Verge,