Netflix has handed out another cancellation.
Terminator Zero creator Mattson Tomlin shared on X that the streamer is not moving forward with a second season of the animated series.
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“It was cancelled,” Tomlin said in response to a fan who asked about the show’s status. “The critical and audience reception to it was tremendous, but at the end of the day not nearly enough people watched it. I would’ve loved to deliver on the Future War I had planned in season’s 2 and 3, but I’m also very happy with how it feels contained as is.”
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“Netflix was really great about supporting the show and giving me tremendous creative freedom to do what I wanted to do,” he continued in another post. “Good partners. The show was expensive and very time consuming. The only way they could justify it was if the audience showed up for it, and they just didn’t.”
TVLine has confirmed the show’s cancellation, which comes nearly a year and a half after Terminator Zero premiered on Netflix in August 2024. Per the show’s logline, in 2022, “a future war has raged for decades between the few human survivors and an endless army of machines.” Meanwhile, in 1997, “the AI known as Skynet gained self-awareness and began its war against humanity.”
“Caught between the future and this past is a soldier sent back in time to change the fate of humanity,” the logline continues. “She arrives in 1997 to protect a scientist named Malcolm Lee, who works to launch a new AI system designed to compete with Skynet’s impending attack on humanity. As Malcolm navigates the moral complexities of his creation, he is hunted by an unrelenting assassin from the future, which forever alters the fate of his three children.”
The voice cast includes André Holland, Sonoya Mizuno, Sumalee Montano, Armani Jackson, Gideon Adlon, Carter Rockwood, Rosario Dawson, and Timothy Olyphant. While the series didn’t seem to have enough viewership, it certainly seemed to have enough support. The series has an 87% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes with a 79% audience score, but alas, it just wasn’t strong enough for Netflix. The fact that fans had to wait so long to get any kind of news did not look promising, so at the very least, the truth is out now. Even if it wasn’t the truth that people wanted.