Scavengers Reign is a sci-fi animated series that originally aired on Max in 2023 before moving to Netflix earlier this year. It was, and I say this without hyperbole, one of the most extraordinary works of animation I have ever seen.
It was wild. Stunning on a technical level, breath-taking on a "look at these weird little guys level", with a story and cast of oddballs whose desperate attempts to survive on a hostile alien planet have haunted me for months.
Scavengers Reign deserved to be seen and enjoyed by anyone who has even a passing interest in adult animation. And then it deserved to either continue with a second season or lead to a deal that allowed its creators the time and space to make something else.
But hey, this is 2024, so we're getting neither of those things. The show is, "as of right now", dead in the water, with co-creator Joe Bennett posting on Instagram:
In case that embed disappears or doesn't display properly, his post reads:
As of right now, Scavengers Reign is not being renewed for a second season.
I wanted to let everyone know directly because I really love our fanbase, they’ve been such champions for the show, and I don’t want to leave everyone hanging.
We’ve had to fight tooth and nail every step of the way to get this show made, starting all the way back in 2016 with the Scavengers short film to the release of the first season last year.
It’s a case study for believing in something and persevering through a million and one hurdles. But, it got made, thanks especially to so many people who supported it along the way, in big and small ways. I want to thank some of those people, starting with my co-creator Charles Huettner @charles.huettner , Chris Prynoski @chrisprynoski and everyone at @titmouseinc , my home base at @greenstreetpictures , the writers, directors, and so many incredible artists who worked tirelessly on the show, and the folks at Max who were incredible partners to work with.
But this is not the end. There is more story to be told, we are ready to make another season, and we produced in-house at Green Street a teaser for what was going to come in the second season.
This is extremely disappointing on a singular level; I loved that show, and this teaser shows that the team's ideas for a second season looked just as crazy (and beautiful) as the first.
But it's even more disappointing in a wider sense. Scavengers Reign is one of the most remarkable achievements of modern animation. It had fans on Max, and then when it got shunted to Netflix it found even more fans. Did it top the charts? No, of course not, it's a cartoon about weird bugs and sad astronauts. But people watched it, it generated hype online, and it even managed to win an Emmy.
That should have been enough to ensure some level of success, but instead here we are, talking about a show that had to beg its audience to partake in word-of-mouth marketing when it switched networks just to keep it alive, and which has now been punted by Netflix presumably because it didn't make a line go up fast or hard enough.
I hope the team are able to find somewhere willing to help them out, if not to make a second season of Scavengers Reign then to at least make something similar. Because platforms like Max and Netflix have shown they're not just unfriendly to this kind of art, they don't deserve it.
