Westworld Fans Create Last-Ditch Effort to Save Canceled HBO Series

By Aaron Perine

Westworld fans are putting on the full-court press to try and save the show after the surprising cancellation from Warner Bros. Discovery and HBO. If you're looking to join the effort to bring it back, the fans are telling people to visit savewestworld.com. Over there, they outline a path to getting a streamer like Amazon to pick up Westworld and complete the long-running story, rather than leaving it unfinished. The decision to cut the program loose follows numerous other cancellations and shelvings for tax purposes in every corner of the streaming landscape. In this case, there are plans to sell the rights to stream Westworld to an ad-based streamer like Freevee or PlutoTV. But, nothing has materialized yet.

The fans explained, "We invite every person who loves Westworld to join the movement by sharing the website, signing the petition and by making some noise on social media using the hashtag #savewestworld."

"Making Westworld has been one of the highlights of our careers. We are deeply grateful to our extraordinary cast and crew for creating these indelible characters and brilliant worlds," Kilter Films said in a statement. "We've been privileged to tell these stories about the future of consciousness – both human and beyond – in the brief window of time before our AI overlords forbid us from doing so." 

Why Did Westworld Get Cancelled?

A recent investor call saw the President & CEO of Discovery Streaming & International, Jean-Briac Perrette, eerily call out big budget shows that would be cancelled without naming Westworld by name. The comments are strange and seemingly broad enough, but when you consider the exact number he names in ratings, the coincidence is kind of striking. 

"The audience will tell you what they love, they'll spend time with it. They'll watch it and rewatch it and you can see it, you could see it on cable, and free to air in terms of the ratings, and we could see it on (HBO) Max in seeing exactly what people spend time with. And we look at it, and we look at it hard. If we have a scripted show that's $7.5 million dollars. And it's getting a 0.03 ...We're very committed to scripted, but we want to measure what people are watching and what they're not. If a repeat of Two and a Half Men or Big Bang Theory does three times the ratings of another season that we greenlit of a show that's costing us seven and a half million dollars, we're going to cancel that show."

Are you hoping to see the show get saved? Let us know down in the comments!

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