The Real Reason Marvel's Runaways Got Canceled

Marvel's Runaways is being run off the air.

On Monday, November 18, Hulu announced that Runaways will end after its fast-approaching third season, set to hit the Disney-owned streaming platform on December 13.

Deadline confirmed the news, further noting that fans will get closure with Runaways season 3, which is said to bring the narrative to a, quote, "natural close" and neatly wrap up the story that follows six teen heroes whose parents belong to a coalition of super-villains.

So, what really happened to push Marvel TV and Hulu to axe the show? Well, you can blame the numbers for that, it's always the numbers.

Sure, fans adored the show, and critics were kind to it, but Runaways was actually performing worse than its fellow Marvel superhero series. You know, the ones that were all canceled at Netflix between late 2018 and early 2019.

In a March 2019 data report, Business Insider provided analytics from Jumpshot that indicated roughly 640,000 people watched the first season of Runaways in its first week on Hulu in November 2017, with 825,000 people tuning into the second season during its first week in December 2018. That may sound like a lot of people, but it isn't. Even the bumped-up viewership number for Marvel's Runaways season 2 was only about half the amount of people who watched the least-viewed Marvel show on Netflix: the highly criticized Iron Fist, which pulled in 1.6 million viewers in the first week after dropping its second season. Unsurprisingly, Runaways couldn't hold a candle to the most-watched Netflix-Marvel show at the time, Daredevil, with 5.8 million week-one viewers for season 2.

Business Insider noted that despite rising interest from season 1 to season 2 of Marvel's Runaways, neither installment ever reached the million-viewer mark in the first week. This could be, as the outlet stated, down to declining viewership for all of Marvel's streaming series. Viewership trends that were "headed in the wrong direction" for the superhero series on Netflix, followed by the rapid-fire cancelations of every single Marvel-Netflix show, may have pushed more casual viewers away from Runaways, possibly because they feared the show would soon suffer the same fate as Daredevil and the like. Keep watching the video to see the real reason Marvel's Runaways got canceled!

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