Netflix has opted not to renew “The Midnight Club” for a second season, TheWrap has learned exclusively. The YA horror-thriller series was co-created and executive produced by Mike Flanagan, along with creator Leah Fong, based on Christopher Pike’s creative works.
“The Midnight Club” premiered on Netflix on Oct. 7 to both positive critics’ and audience reviews; however, it only remained on the Netflix Top 10 for three weeks. At the end of the day, viewership numbers stacked up unfavorably with series cost. Upon its debut on the chart, it was ranked at No. 4, with 18.8 million hours viewed. It gained traction in week two with 49.9 million viewing hours, peaking at No. 3. After sliding back to No. 5 in its third week, the series dropped off the list entirely in week four, facing heavy competition from “The Watcher,” “Dahmer,” “Guillermo del Toro’s Cabinet of Curiosities,” “From Scratch” and “Big Mouth,” among other titles.
The news comes after the announcement that Flanagan and longtime creative partner Trevor Macy’s Intrepid Pictures would be jumping from the streamer to Amazon Studios, where they have just inked an exclusive multiyear series production deal. The horror producing duo were behind popular horror-tinged series “The Haunting of Hill House,” “The Haunting of Bly Manor” and “Midnight Mass” at Netflix, where they are currently wrapping up their previous deal. Flanagan and Tracy still have another project set at the streamer, “The Fall of the House of Usher,” which will offer a modern re-telling of the eponymous Edgar Allan Poe story.
In a previous interview with TheWrap, Flanagan teased that upcoming series as “blood-soaked.” He said, “It’s crazy. It is unlike anything I’ve ever done, but in the other direction. My favorite way to describe it to people is like ‘Hill House’ is kind of a string quartet, and ‘Bly Manor’ is this delicate, kind of beautiful piece of classical piano music, and ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ is heavy metal. It’s rock ‘n’ roll.”
“The Midnight Club” follows the eight teens of the eponymous Midnight Club, who meet at the witching hour in their hospice library under the fireplace luminescence to bond over spooky tales. As they share ghost stories to escape from the reality of their terminal diagnoses, the group uncovers the building’s own mysterious history and looks for signs of the supernatural from beyond. Set in 1994 at Brightcliffe Manor, the show draws inspiration from Pike’s “Witch,” “Gimme a Kiss,” “Road to Nowhere,” “The Wicked Heart” and more.
The series stars Iman Benson, Igby Rigney, Ruth Codd, Annarah Cymone, Chris Sumpter, Adia, Aya Furukawa, Sauriyan Sapkota, Matt Biedel, Samantha Sloyan, with frequent Flanagan collaborator Zach Gilford and “A Nightmare on Elm Street” star Heather Langenkamp. Many of the show’s ensemble made their acting debuts with the series, and Codd, Rigney, Furukawa and Sapkota will be featured in “The Fall of the House of Usher,” alongside Gilford, Sloyan and previous Flanagan series stars Rahul Kohli and Henry Thomas.
Those who saw “The Midnight Club” know that the thriller series ended on a cliffhanger featuring a major reveal. In the last moments of Episode 10, Dr. Georgina Stanton (Langenkamp) — who had just rebuked Ilonka (Benson) for her dangerous involvement with Shasta’s (Sloyan) iteration of the mysterious Paragon — takes off her wig, revealing a bald head (potentially signifying her undergoing chemotherapy) and a neck tattoo of the cult’s half-filled hourglass symbol, leading to numerous questions about where exactly her loyalty lies.
Flanagan assured fans that answers would come in later installments, as the series was designed to be ongoing (as opposed to his previous three projects at the streamer). The producer noted that in the event of a cancellation, he would still let fans know of the story’s resolutions.
“I promised everybody at Comic-Con yesterday that I’d put up all the all the answers to the central mysteries on Twitter, which I will honor,” he told TheWrap previously. “But yeah, the show was designed to carry forward and we made the decision in the writers room not to reveal two of our kind of bigger existential secrets of the show so that we’d have something to say in the second season.”
