Cowboy bebop.
There is a service called Netflix.
Even with the casting of John Cho as Spike Spiegel, the Cowboy Bebop adaptation was always going to be a risk.
The show is getting mixed reviews now that it has arrived. It has done one thing we rarely see with mediocre productions, it has put critics and fans on the same page.
Cowboy Bebop has a rotten rating from critics and a poor score from its audience, but it has a good rating from the people who watch it. This is unusual to see, as generally speaking, audience scores trend higher than critics scores, or in this case, we could have seen the opposite, where die-hard fans of the anime dislike the show more than critics who are unfamiliar with the original. They are on the same page. This is reflected by Metacritic. The show has a rating of 47 with critics and 4.5 with fans.
There are reviews.
Tomatoes are rotten.
This has not been the case with most of the productions. The most glaring example of this is Red Notice, which has a pretty terrible 35% score from critics, but a wildly disparate 92% score from audiences, which my wife loved the film after we watched it last night. Sometimes audiences agree with critics on the higher end of the board, like in the case of Arcane's 100% critic score, but generally speaking, audience scores trend higher, especially in the superhero/comic adaptation/sci-fi/etc genres.
What does this mean for Cowboy Bebop? It is not great news. If audiences also reject something at the same pace, then what is the point of having a second season of a movie or a movie sequel? If Cowboy Bebop doesn't move up the top 10 charts and stay there for a while, I don't think a second season will happen. I think the best case scenario would be for it to return with a lower budget like Altered Carbon did, or it could be canceled completely. It would be a bit of a high profile failure for the streaming service who made a big deal about the adaptation and got everyone excited about its potential.
It is not looking great if it is a hit with neither critics nor audiences, but we will see.
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The Herokiller series and The Earthborn trilogy are also available on audiobook.
