The new James Gunn-led DC universe will have a Swamp Thing movie which will be Directed by James Mangold. We also had a Swamp Thing TV Show some people liked that show, but then it was canceled.
But Why Was Swamp Thing Cancelled? I’m coming to you with some pretty bad thing that happened to a show which had potential. For those of you who have not already heard, the show Swamp Thing that was released on the DC streaming service (DC Universe) in 2019 was already canceled just after airing the first episode of the first Season. I mean why would you do that?
Now the reason that this is such a big deal is because, usually studios will wait and see how something performs before they decide the entire fate of a show, but this was actually decided apparently already before the show even came out.
There seems to be a good bit of confusion out there about why Swamp Thing was canceled, especially due to the fact that everybody seems to have really liked it. The show has a very high production value, the character development, story structure, everything seemed to be on point and people really enjoyed Swamp Thing.
Why Was Swamp Thing Cancelled?
A ton of sites have come out reporting this news and the one thing that they all share in common is that they all seem to be citing creative differences as the main reason that this show was canceled. And that is actually not the real reason at all, the real reason is money.
You see, the majority of Swamp Thing was actually filmed in North Carolina, and North Carolina promised a $40 million tax rebate that was actually not delivered. $40 million is approximately half of the production budget for the entire first season of Swamp Thing. And Swamp Thing did have a fairly high production value if you’ve watched the first episode.
This is the reason that production was shut down so abruptly, and it was reported that they were cutting the season short by three episodes just before the season actually launched.
So the reason here that this happened is because the North Carolina Department of Commerce has a grant program that awards money to companies that are coming in to do filming in the state of North Carolina. When the Appropriations Committee was looking over the current budget and what they currently had available before budgeting, they thought that they had $67 million available. So the proposal was a $31 million increase in funding.
But when they found out they had the $67 million in their budget, they went ahead and were like, well, we don’t really need to use that 31, let’s just send this other thirty-one else somewhere else in the state. Except here’s the thing, they didn’t actually have $67 million. So they didn’t appropriate anything and the entire mix-up left the program essentially penniless.
So it was announced that the North Carolina Department of Commerce would give DC Universe $12 million from the grant of the original 40 million promise. But of course, those two numbers are drastically different. DC can’t expect to make up that difference when filming in that state, they halted production and ended filming the show drastically sooner than they would have.
How Do Movies And TV Show Tax Production Work?
A quick crash course on how they actually make movies and television shows is that in each state, in the United States, or sometimes in foreign countries, there will be a tax rebate, which is a giant pile of money that the state will basically give to a movie or a TV show that is shooting there in order to come to shoot there. Because when people shoot a TV show or they film a movie somewhere, it basically brings a bunch of jobs and a bunch of money and other things to that area.
So, the state of Georgia, for instance, gives a bunch of money to the Marvel people to shoot all their big Avengers movies there. But the actual production itself brings extra money into the state, so the state of Georgia winds up benefitting their local economy by giving a little bit of money to Marvel. And when I say “a little bit of money,” I’m talking tens and hundreds of millions of dollars sometimes.
It’s the same thing for TV shows like Swamp Thing. The problem with the Swamp Thing TV show that got canceled is that North Carolina promised to pay for half of the Swamp Thing TV show, which is about 40 million dollars.
So, imagine they’re spending 80 million dollars on 13 episodes of TV. That allows them to make a crazy high-quality TV show. So don’t you feel a little bit sadder about it now? But because North Carolina apparently made a clerical error when they made that deal with Warner Bros., they only wound up giving a little bit of that money to Warner Bros, so Warner Bros ended up paying way more for the Swamp Thing TV show than they wanted to pay.
This is why they canceled Swamp Thing. It’s just too expensive and costs way more money than they want to spend by themselves.
Why Do Crappy CW DC Shows Get Reviewed?
Even if that sounds a little confusing if you’re wondering why, say, the CW DC TV shows can continue to pull such shit TV ratings but they keep making them every year. Like how can they make so many episodes if it costs so much money and they get really terrible ratings? Why have they renewed Titans for season 2 on the DC Universe but not Swamp Thing?
It’s all about where the money to actually make the TV shows comes from. Because they wouldn’t be making these TV shows if they didn’t make money on them. CW gets almost a billion dollars out of their Netflix syndication deal. So, it doesn’t matter what kind of ratings the CW DC TV shows pull because they’re already making a lot of syndication money on that stuff.
The problem with the DC Universe streaming service was that there is no such syndication deal. So, there was no back-end money coming in. So, Warner Bros was losing money on the service to pay for these high-quality TV shows and the reason why Titans got renewed for season 2 in the same year was because Netflix bought the rights to syndicate it internationally.
So, Warner Bros. is getting most of its money for that show from Netflix, whereas that’s not the case with Swamp Thing. It’s always possible something could change but that’s the same thing with all those DC Universe TV shows that they’ve started making now.
What eventually though, is that they folded the DC Universe shows and all that service into the larger Warner Bros streaming service HBO Max, or just Max. So, now you get more content and they bundled the DC Universe content with HBO’s content. So, theoretically, when you pay for that, you get all the HBO stuff too, including pretty much everything that Warner Bros makes in terms of TV shows and movies.
So I wasn’t surprised when I heard the story about combining the DC Universe app/ the DC Universe streaming service with the other Warner Bros content.
Anytime something goes really weird with a production that seems like it’s actually a pretty good project, it’s all about the money. Remember, it takes tens of millions of dollars to produce these TV shows. If it were a movie, it would be in the hundreds of millions of dollars. Hopefully, that explains Why Was Swamp Thing Cancelled?
What We Can Do Revive Shows Like Swamp Thing?
So that is exactly where we’re at right now. We had a television show that appears to have, based on its pilot episode, really good quality, and a lot of people seem to be very happy with it, but we already know it’s canceled. So where do we go from here? I think the only real thing that we can do is for fans to continue to talk about shows like this.
Share things where we discuss the problem, the reality, not the covered-up bullshit reason that people are talking about it out there with “creative differences”. And if people out there really passionate about Swamp Thing and about this show, then let’s fight for it. Tell DC that you want this somewhere else. Maybe it’ll be on another app, maybe it’ll be filmed in another state that can actually afford to, you know, pay back the grant that it was promised.
Just as a last point here, I think anecdotally, it’s fairly obvious that there aren’t many people who have even taken advantage of this DC Universe app. The general buzz around the content that was out there was lukewarm to good. But you know, people just did not want to spend more money on another streaming service, especially if it’s not completely loaded.
It just really sucks to see Swamp Thing cancelled right when the show debuts. I wish they would have at least given it a little bit of time to breathe before deciding its fate. It could have been a hit. I mean even without people logging into the DC app, there was still a good bit of positive buzz around this. It would just be good to see them find a home for these shows somewhere else, even if they couldn’t have them on their own stand-alone Expensive app.
I remember I had actually written an article for a review on the first episode, but seeing as I saw that this news was getting ready to come out, I instead just scrapped that article.
Also Read: Why Was Wonder Woman 3 Cancelled? Will DC Recast Gal Gadot?
