American Born Chinese, the live-action adaptation of Gene Luen Yang’s 2006 graphic novel of the same has been officially scrapped at Disney+ after just one season.
Michelle Yeoh and Jim Liu in American Born Chinese (Disney/Carlos Lopez-Calleja)
The Hollywood Reporter’s Lesley Goldberg reports, “The comedy from Disney Branded Television has been canceled after one season. Sources tell The Hollywood Reporter that producers from Disney’s 20th Television will shop the series.”
Goldberg later added the reason the show was scrapped was due to poor viewership, “Sources say American Born Chinese, which is based on the graphic novel of the same name, did not register with viewers despite Disney’s efforts to expose the series on multiple platforms including Hulu, Roku, YouTube and ABC. (Disney+ does not release viewership data.)”
Ronny Chieng in American Born Chinese (Disney/Carlos Lopez-Calleja)
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According to SpoilerTV, which tracks Nielsen viewership numbers, the show did not chart in the top 20 most streamed programs when it premiered all 8 episodes back on May 24, 2023. The lowest streamed series in the top 20 for the week was Netflix’s Xo, Kitty. That series only brought in 429 million minutes viewed.
In it did not chart in the subsequent either. The lowest performing series was Prime Video’s Shiny Happy People: Duggar Family Secrets. It only brought in 380 million minutes viewed.
Sydney Taylor and Ben Wang in American Born Chinese (Disney/Carlos Lopez-Calleja)
The series had average user ratings. On IMDb it has an average of 7.0 out of 10 albeit it only received 6,200 reviews indicating the viewership for the show was not there. In contrast, XO, Kitty received a 6.5 rating at IMDb, but has received over double the number of reviews with 13,000.
On Rotten Tomatoes the series had an average audience score of 82%. It received a 4.1 out of 5 average rating.
Daniel Wu in American Born Chinese (Disney/Carlos Lopez-Calleja)
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American Born Chinese is the latest in a string of failures for The Walt Disney Company. Infamously, the company scrapped Lucasfilm’s Willow after one season. Not only did they scrap it, but they removed the series from Disney+ as part of a massive write down.
The company’s then Chief Financial Officer Christine McCarthy announced the write off during one of the company’s earnings reports last year. She said, “We are in the process of reviewing the content on our DTC services to align with the strategic changes in our approach to content curation that you’ve heard Bob discuss. As a result we will be removing certain content from our streaming platform and currently expect to take an impairment charge of approximately $1.5 to $1.8 billion. The charge, which will not be recorded in our segment results, will primarily be recognized in the third quarter as we complete our review and remove the content. And going forward we intend to produce lower volumes of content in alignment with this strategic shift.”
Michelle Yeoh in American Born Chinese (Disney/Carlos Lopez-Calleja)
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Not only has Disney had massive failures on the streaming front, but its failed epically at the box office as well. Box office analyst OMB Reviews recently detailed that The Walt Disney Company lost well over $1 billion from its theatrical releases in 2023.
He detailed, “Right now, I’m saying Disney has lost over a billion dollars this year in just their theatrical releases.”
He went on to assert that Disney’s losses are “close to $1.5 billion … just in the last year 2023 and just based off of theatrical with the numbers we currently have available.”
Later in the video, he shared, “The best argument you can make is that they lost close to a billion dollars when in reality you’re looking at probably somewhere closer to $1.2 to $1.8 billion dollars in financial losses especially as we get closer to what the actual budgets for these movies were and actually even update these further to have any reported marketing budgets on top of that.”
He then noted, “The only profitable movie they actually have is still Guardians and it’s barely profitable.” He detailed the film only brought in around $4 million in profits.
“Basically, the news of Disney for this past year is this: none of their movies made money and the only one that conceivably made any money barely made any and hardly made enough to pay for any other projects going forward,” he concluded.
Jim Liu and Michelle Yeoh in American Born Chinese (Disney/Carlos Lopez-Calleja)
What do you make of American Born Chinese getting scrapped after a single season?
