The CW’s extension of The 100 franchise is officially no more. On Friday, it was reported that the currently-untitled prequel series is officially axed by the network, after two years of being in development. The series was teed up in a backdoor pilot of The 100‘s seventh and final season, in an episode titled “Anaconda.” Iola Evans (Carnival Row), Adain Bradley (Riverdale), and Leo Howard (Why Women Kill) were all attached to star. The latest update surrounding the series had arrived in May of this year, when network president Mark Pedowitz had indicated that discussions were still being had. Previous reporting had indicated that it could have potentially been a co-production between The CW and the HBO Max streaming service.
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“I bet you’re gonna be shocked by this: There are still discussions going on,” Pedowitz said. “It is not done in any way shape or form, but there’s discussions still happening.”
The 100 prequel series has previously been described as taking place 97 years before the beginning of The 100, which began with a group of 100 young people being sent down to Earth as a punishment for crimes committed on the space station where everyone lived. It was believed that the planet might once again be inhabitable following an event that wiped out the majority of civilization. The prequel will show the original apocalypse that sent the human race fleeing earth for space. The series will follow a band of survivors on the ground as they learn how to deal with the dangerous new status quo while also fighting to create a new and better society.
“They asked me to develop a prequel, and there were several different avenues that we could have gone down,” creator Jason Rothenberg told ComicBook.com about the episode previously. “My initial thought was, ‘let’s do it in space where, as we know, the Ark is coming together at this time. All the ancestors of our protagonist in the original show from the original 100 are up in space.’ But then this became kind of … We keyed it into what the prequel should be because it made more sense for the story we were telling in season seven.”
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