It’s easy to do.
Netflix cancelled their live action reimaginings, Cowboy Bebop after just three weeks. It’s the first smart move by Netflix, but a telling one, and it has a lot of lessons to impart to studios if they’re willing to pay attention.
For those of you who aren’t caught up on the saga of Netflix’s Bebop, you can read my previous comments on it in the link below.
(Read: We Need to Talk About the Live-Action ‘Cowboy Bebop’ Remake)
Deadline reports that the show’s budget was very high, which meant the audience threshold it needed to renew for its renewal was even higher. They usually wait around 28 days to find out if the show attracts enough viewers. The company gave up on the show after the 26th day. The show wasn’t attracting viewers, instead, plummeting 59 percent in viewership after the first week, but it was definitely attracting a lot of anger and bad press. It wasn’t hard to see why either.
This show was more like a parody anime series than an actual live-action adaptation. It even felt disrespectful. Modern concepts were introduced and characters became confusing until they could no longer be recognized. Here are just some examples.
The anime’s main villain was Vicious, a leader of organized crime syndicates. He’s skilled, dangerous, cold, calculating, and inspires intense loyalty among his followers. More importantly, he’s absent for most of the show in order to solidify the fact that he’s a ghost that haunts the main character, Spike Spiegal. He’s sometimes alluded to, but when he does make an appearance, his presence has an intense gravity that sucks everyone and everything around him in. He has only one equal, and that’s the main character, Spike.
Vicious in the Netflix version is an emotionally overemotional man-child, who beats his wife. He also fights against betrayals and other people’s lies as he attempts to make it big at the top of the syndicate. His original gravity was replaced by annoyance, revulsion and a lack of emotion. His presence onscreen made the show sink.
Then there’s Gren, a character that fought alongside Vicious in a war and had his life saved by him. After the war, he was sentenced and tried. He later discovers Vicious had testified against him. This caused him extreme emotional pain and led him to try an experimental calming medication that could have the side effect of increasing his breast size. Gren tried to get Vicious to meet him using Vicious’ feminine form, posing as Julia from far away. Gren was unable to murder Vicious, despite being lured in by him, and he is left with a severe wound. He asks Spike, in his final moments of despair, to let his body drift through space until it reaches the place where he was happy and whole.
Netflix saw one aspect of Gren, the breasts on a man, and just turned him into a transgendered dude who helps run a bar…that’s it. This amazing character was made into an LGBT pander bear.
It is most shocking that Vicious and Spike portray Julia as the main driving force, which I find to be the least acceptable. She is rarely seen in the anime but it does mean something. Spike’s love for Julia and her love for him makes them ready to sacrifice everything and leave the life of the syndicate they both worked for behind. They are betrayed by Vicious and forced to part, with Julia going into hiding, but when Spike finally finds her after years, she’s taken from him by a syndicate goon’s lucky bullet. Spike’s last words to her are assuring her that it’s all just a dream. Her death becomes the catalyst for Vicous and Spike’s tragic final confrontation.
Julia, Vicious’s abused wife, is shown as a crying, plotting revenge husband. She even betrays Spike, her ex-love, and shoots him through a window, taking Vicious hostage to become leader of the syndicate.
Netflix also might have miscast Spike Spiegal with John Cho, who doesn’t have the same cool-factor that Spike had. This may have been more the writer’s fault than Cho, but still, Spike’s were a big shoe to fill and Cho just didn’t seem like the right size. They also tried to make Faye Valentine, the co-lead actress, more feminist than she was. In the anime, she’s cool and clever but mouthy, confident, and forward yet hides a deep sadness underneath. Netflix’s adaptation of the story uses Daniella Pineda as her director, but Faye is stripped of her coolness and given a dose of feminism. Now she’s good at hand-to-hand combat and can hold her own against men twice her size. Oh, and she’s a lesbian now, too, because apparently sex between women is empowering.
To be fair, I have nothing bad to say about Mustafa Shakir’s portrayal of co-lead Jet. His writing is my only complaint.
It is just one reason why the show fell apart. Many viewers tuned out because of the disrespect shown to original fans. Writing felt cheap. It was more about pandering to socio-political group than it was actually writing a compelling story. This is the easiest part of the lesson to learn, but here’s where I think Hollywood will really struggle.
Hollywood continues to revive IPs in order to prey on our nostalgia but becomes angry with the property’s fans when they inevitably pipe up with criticisms. They begin attacking the fans of the IP, mocking them, and telling them this recreation of their beloved creation isn’t for them.
These reboots and revamps end up costing the studios money. They can come up with excuses as to why something failed all day, but the truth is that when you make something that has a wide fanbase, it’s the fanbase you have to get through first. Because the fanbase is the source of all the inspiration, the creator’s soul. People who are passionate about the show or characters know the music, feel and personalities. People who love Cowboy Bebop know what makes it work, why it works and how to keep it going strong for decades.
If the strategy is to not listen to and dismiss the fans to the point of actively taunting them and putting them down (as Pineda did) then you’re not going to get the full idea of what the property really is. It’s like trying to recreate a song without understanding what made the song great. This creates something shallow and off-beat with little soul.
And that’s what troubled Netflix’s Bebop. It didn’t listen to fans. The original had no soul, so it served something shiny but boring in taste.
A studio’s first concern when bringing something from the past into the present is to listen to what the fans have to say about it. They won’t please everyone, but it’ll at least give them a very good starting point to build off from. They are experts who understand the property more than anybody else. You don’t go jumping out of planes without experts first showing you the ins and outs, and you don’t recreate properties without the experts doing the same.
Calling fans “toxic” or other deriding labels is a surefire way to have your recreation live in infamy and eventually forgotten. Studio owners need their fans more than ever. They’re the ones with all the passion for the project.
This is the hard lesson they’re going to have to learn, and it won’t get better until they do.
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