Why Netflix Canceled Michael Cera's Scott Pilgrim Takes Off

We are Sex Bob-Omb and we are here to make you think about how silly it would be to read this without watching the entire season of "Scott Pilgrim Takes Off" because there are heavy spoilers ahead and stuff!

There are too many live-action remakes of animated projects. More often than not, these remakes merely take away the uniqueness, the endless imagination and possibilities, and the exquisite visual styles of their source material and reduce them to bland, visually uninteresting live-action movies without personality. Even the best ones struggle to reach the heights of their animated counterparts.

Sure, their continued existence makes sense commercially, but creatively every studio in Hollywood is going about things all wrong here. Why turn great animated movies into dull live-action slop when you could just turn an already fantastic live-action project into an even better animated one? "The Animatrix" fulfilled the promise of the world and the visual language of "The Matrix" (and moved the franchise closer to its anime origins), while "Star Wars" animation continues to prove that "Star Wars" is best when it's animated.

This brings us to "Scott Pilgrim Takes Off," which is not a remake but a remix of both Bryan Lee O'Malley's "Scott Pilgrim" graphic novels and Edgar Wright's 2010 live-action film adaptation "Scott Pilgrim vs. the World." "Scot Pilgrim Takes Off" is also of the best anime of the 2020s and an improvement on O'Malley's comics and Wright's movie alike (each of which, to be clear, is quite good in its own right).

The show starts out as a pretty faithful retelling of both the "Scott Pilgrim" comics and film, only to take a wild detour and tell a story that re-contextualizes the entire franchise, giving side characters newfound depth and nuance while shining a light on characters that didn't get their due previously. Plus, the whole thing looks gorgeous, with a vibrant color palette and a kineticism in the movements that could only be achieved in animation.

Which made the news that Netflix would not be making additional seasons of "Scott Pilgrim Takes Off" all the more tragic for me.

Netflix didn't give a reason for the cancellation of "Scott Pilgrim Takes Off," which actually had pretty good viewership. In the second half of 2023, the anime was the fourth most-watched anime "franchise" on Netflix based on the total hours watched over the hours available (per Anime News Network). Still, the fact that it had a not-inexpensive star-studded cast and still came in fourth place after shows like "Demon Slayer" (which Netflix does not pay to produce) meant "Scott Pilgrim Takes Off" was simply too expensive an investment.

That being said, it's not like the show was left on a cliffhanger. Creators Bryan Lee O'Malley and BenDavid Grabinski envisioned the first season as a complete, self-contained story. It essentially adapted the entirety of the "Scott Pilgrim" comics (or, rather, its own version of them) and gave satisfying endings to every character and story arc. Still, the finale did leave the door open for storylines that could have been explored in future seasons.

"It's self-contained for now. We loved what we did. We put it all in there. We don't have any ideas lying on the floor. We pretty much put them all in," as O'Malley told Rolling Stone around the time of the show's premiere. "I never say never, but right now, it seems like it would take about 50 different miracles simultaneously for another season to happen."

"Scott Pilgrim Takes Off" ends with Gideon (Jason Schwartzman) failing to kill Matt Patel (Satya Bhabha) in retribution for stealing his company and Matt deciding to just give it all back to Gideon because he thought running a company was boring. Then, in a mid-credits scene, we see Gideon and Aubrey Plaza's Julie (who had been dating Gideon for a while) sitting in a dark and ominous room filled with countless screens plotting against Scott (Michael Cera) and Ramona (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) all menacingly. "Time for the real games to begin," Gideon says as the screen turns black, with Julie chiming in, "The Goose is loose: honk, honk, f***ers!"

We don't need to know what happens next for the story to feel complete, but it's still a bummer to think that we could have seen Gideon and Julie work together to take down Scott and Ramona. This, of course, doesn't necessarily mean another League of Evil Exes plot; season 1 made it clear Ramona's exes had moved on from their feelings for her. Instead, season 2 could have been about something entirely original, which is both exciting and unfortunate. Perhaps there would've been another time-travel story or maybe even a multiverse storyline. Or, based on their final lines of the show, what if Gideon and Julie had become a Jigsaw-like expert in torture and sadistic games in a more horror-centric sequel? We may never know.