Horizon Zero Dawn Netflix Series Reportedly Cancelled

Allegations of abuse from showrunner Steve Blackman may have killed the series.

By Jenna Anderson

The long-gestating Horizon Zero Dawn television series might be scrapped. Earlier this week, a report from Rolling Stone investigated allegations of misconduct from television writer Steve Blackman, who is best known for showrunning Netflix's The Umbrella Academy. The piece's author, Cheyenne Roundtree, subsequently reported on X that two projects Blackman additionally had set up at Netflix — Horizon Zero Dawn and the original series Orbital — are no longer moving forward at the platform. Netflix has not officially commented on the matter. It is unknown at this point if Horizon Zero Dawn and Orbital were scrapped because of the allegations against Blackman, which include instances of "toxic, bullying, manipulative, and retaliatory behavior" towards writers and staff members on The Umbrella Academy.

"Scoop: Rolling Stone has learned that two of 'Umbrella Academy' showrunner Steve Blackman's projects that were in development at Netflix, a Horizon Zero Dawn series and an original series, Orbital, are no longer moving forward," Roundtree's post reads.

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What Is Horizon Zero Dawn About?

Initially released in 2017, Horizon Zero Dawn is set in an era where Machines roam the land and mankind is no longer the dominant species, a young hunter named Aloy embarks on a journey to discover her destiny. The game spawned a sequel, Horizon Forbidden West, in 2022, as well as the recent spinoff LEGO Horizon Adventures. It has been quite some time since there have been any significant updates on Horizon Zero Dawn television series, which was first reported to be in early development in May of 2022. The most recent report came from comments from Sony at the Consumer Electronics Show in January of this year, which indicated that the show was actively being written.

"The same care and formula that we did with The Last of Us, we're going to be applying for Horizon [and] God of War," PlayStation Productions head Asad Qizilbash said in a 2023 interview. "We're gonna tell the story of the game because we can, because it's a show, we have the time to do it, we've got the episodes to be able to do it. We're not trying to cram it into a two hour movie. You're gonna get the story of the game, but we're going to also find opportunities to go wider and explore other characters and do more worldbuilding that you can't do in the game because of agency. That's the exciting thing for me, fans are going to love it because they're going to see that game come to life, but also a lot of new things like what they did with The Last of Us."

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