It's kind of funny that we're considering Cartoon Network a potential savior for this series, considering it was NOT kind to the last Batman series it had AT ALL. 2013 me wouldn't have believed that for a minute.
I could see Hulu taking it since they've had some WB series, but DC content seems to do well on Netflix, so I wouldn't be surprised if they swooped in on it, even though Netflix had its own controversies just a few months ago.
Latest blog update (November 5th, 2022).I don't want to imagine this, but it's likely that the show would be screwed by Cartoon Network. When was the last time an action show was treated well by CN?
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The answer to that question is probably Batman: The Brave And The Bold, which made three seasons between 2008 and 2011. Beware the Batman, in 2013, was its intended successor, but it only lasted one season. The decline of action/adventure cartoons, however, is not just a Cartoon Network thing. It's been going on for almost fifteen years now, and I've explained why it happened elsewhere.
Long story short, it turns out these shows are more expensive to make than episodic comedies, and for a while in the early-to-mid 2000s you had major networks dialing back their in-house action cartoons in favor of cheaper imported anime. The action cartoons that remained during this time, like Teen Titans, Danny Phantom, Kim Possible, and American Dragon Jake Long, tended to be more comedic than their 1990s predecessors. When the "anime boom" ended in the late 2000s— that was when Toonami ended, and most anime disappeared from American daytime TV— the damage had been done.
There were some attempts to do serious 90s-style adventure cartoons again in the early 2010s, like Thundercats 2011 and Legend of Korra, but by and large they seem to have been unsuccessful. The only ones that have found any form of success are those that have strong comedy elements, such as Adventure Time, Gravity Falls, and Steven Universe.
Completely non-comedic cartoons seem to do better on streaming, or at least that was the case as of a couple years ago. Now, with the "streaming bubble" apparently in the process of bursting, what will be the fate of the cartoon genre it kept alive all by its lonesome? Restricting ourselves to Cartoon Network for the moment, it seems as though Batman: Caped Crusader and My Adventures with Superman will air there regardless of where they stream, and the same is probably true of Unicorn: Warriors Eternal. But whether any of these shows will last beyond their initial order and be renewed for additional seasons is another question entirely.
Edited by ElSquibbonator on Aug 23rd 2022 at 4:28:26 AM
What do you consider successful? What does the industry consider successful, for that matter? The metric has historically been different for programs aimed at kids and programs aimed and a general/adult audience. Thundercats 2011, while a lot of criticism was aimed at it, was mostly considered to be unsuccessful by it's producers because its toyline bombed. For shows aimed at general/adult audiences, success is judged by viewership, isn't it? Legend of Korra's ratings declined in the third season, but Nickelodeon notoriously undermined the show by moving it around on the schedule and not promoting it. History has been kinder to Korra as the show has a dedicated fanbase, as does the Avatar franchise in general (and Avatar: The Last Airbender has done extremely well on streaming, as I understand).
I suppose that's a question that has to be considered when considering animated programming of any kind: how is the parent company going to continue to make money off of this? Because answering that question will go a long way towards determining what survives and what doesn't. If it's not selling toys and video games, and isn't attached to a larger franchise, what's it's likelihood of generating income for the people who paid to make it?
As far as animated dramas go, Primal seems to be doing quite well for itself on Adult Swim— it's well-advertised, gets reasonably good ratings and has regular reruns. In fact, there was a marathon of it last Thursday night.
Edited by ElSquibbonator on Aug 23rd 2022 at 6:22:58 AM
At least with the DC cartoons, it's less about the "success" of the shows themselves and more about how the toyline is doing. The failure of the Young Justice toyline caused Mattel to cancel it, which led to the show's initial cancelation. Because the Green Lantern movie failed, so did its toyline, which led to Mattel not wanting any toys for GL:TAS, which made the show useless to Cartoon Network. And for some reason, Mattel didn't want toys for Beware the Batman, which again made that show useless to the network.
I think that was also the case with Symbionic Titan and Thundercats 2011, though apparently the latter was also canned so Lego and Cartoon Network could cash in on Ninjago success by releasing Legends of Chima. At least according to Dan Norton.
Latest blog update (November 5th, 2022).
In some cases, a toy manufacturer is assisting the production cost to make these shows happen. If the toy manufacturer sees that their tie-in toy line isn't selling to decently high numbers, then they feel their support is "pointless" and a monetary loss. Pulling out leaves the rest of the production without the support they had before, and if it's significant enough, then the show itself can not continue.
While I realize this is getting off-topic, I do wonder if the increasing irrelevance of physical toys to children in the age of video games and smartphone apps was another factor in the decline of these shows. Kids won't be as excited about a Batman action figure if they can play as him in a video game, after all.
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The TLDR version is that most (if not all) Japanese productions have a committee consisting of several different companies that splits the production cost, and these committees are willing to do this because, nine times out of ten, the project in question is an adaptation of a work that's already popular in a different medium, and they aren't really planning to commit to more than a 12-Episode Anime anyway unless the adaptation does really well.
Edited by RacattackForce on Aug 23rd 2022 at 8:42:45 AM
Yeah, while you'll find original anime every so often (Neon Genesis Evangelion was an original anime, after all; the ancillary products were released either concurrent with it or after it) most of the time anime is based on manga or light novels. Sure, that model could be adopted in the US (imagine if every YA novel series with decent sales had it's own animated series), but it would require production companies to take risks, because it's not historically the way things have been done in the US.

It's been mentioned before, but the guy doesn't seem to understand the scale he's working at. Reality TV prints money...but pretty much only because it's dirt cheap to make, the actual profit levels are surprisingly low. You basically can't lose money on them, so a failure is basically something that doesn't gain any long-term interest.
Like, Paranormal Home Inspectors (yes, this is a real show) was a failure, but not because it lost money. It didn't. It was a failure because it was a bizarre concept really poorly put together and no one watched it, but the ad revenue from its time on Investigation Discovery paid for the whole show and then some, IIRC.