We Could've Gotten Westworld S5 After All, But the Money Just Wasn't Enough for Showrunners
Just last month HBO cancelled it sci-fi Westworld series, which at the time of the premiere enjoyed high ratings and was a smash hit.
The viewership figures plummeted from 1.8 million to 300k views by Season 4. It was a great disappointment for those fans that stayed loyal to the show till the end despite production delays and unorthodox twists. But now it turns out that Season 5 could have happened if the showrunners had agreed to bringing the budget down.
According to The Hollywood Reporter, HBO was thinking about producing Westworld Season 5 for the Warner Bros. Discovery FAST platform. FAST stands for Free Ad-supported Streaming TV, basically, it is a platform for ad-supported video on demand, which covers services like Amazon's FreeVee, Roku Channel, Pluto TV and others, where you don't pay any subscription fees but you have to watch ads.
"The FAST service would allow them to have their cake and eat it, too," THR quotes one of the sources as saying. "Get the write-off of pulling the show from the main service and do something new with it, too," the THR source adds.
Apparently Westworld" showrunners Lisa Joy and Jonathan Nolan rejected the proposal, which would have required a substantially lower budget.
The fans believe that the idea to create a low budget show, which is filled with ads on another network does not sound right.
"If you think the hate for season 3 was huge, imagine a cheap ad filled season," one of the Redditors says. But other Westworld fans argue that no matter what they would be happy to see the end of the story one way or another and that even a shorter season would be better than outright cancellation.
Some of the Reddit gang don't think there should be any attempts to revive the show which has long been dead – from Season 1 to be precise. They believe the ratings were abysmal and when someone says "HBO," it is GoT, House of the Dragon, White Lotus or Euphoria that come to your mind and not Westworld.
The biggest problem with the series is that Season 2 lost an army of viewers from Season 1 and this is when the show was doomed. As for now the cast – who will still get paid for Season 5, which will never happen – are involved in other projects and Westworld is the last thing they think of.