Disney Threw Away ‘The Spiderwick Chronicles’ — But Luckily Roku Saved It
2023 will long be remembered as the year Disney suddenly shifted its streaming strategy.
After years of focusing on subscriber count and losing billions of dollars, Wall Street had begun to frown on Disney’s streaming business. Bob Iger needed to take action.
(Photo Illustration by Mateusz Slodkowski/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)
Last May, Disney announced that as part of its plans to reach streaming profitability by Q4 2024, multiple shows would be pulled from both Disney+ and Hulu. Most of the series ended up being the same streaming originals that Disney had developed to draw streamers to Disney+ in the first place.
In addition to removing content en masse for the first time, Disney also began to cancel series that were in development. Some of them had already finished production yet never aired.
NBC News
One such series was The Spiderwick Chronicles.
Cancelled Before Premiering
The fantasy series had wrapped production on its first season when showrunner Aron Eli Coleite got a call from Nicole Clemens, the president of Paramount Television.
Disney was pulling the plug on The Spiderwick Chronicles despite the fact that the series had yet to air.
Photo: Disney
“There was no fighting against it,” Coleite recalled to the New York Times.
“I thought I had experienced every type of pain there was imaginable as a writer,” he said. “I have sold pilots that didn’t get into production. I’ve made pilots that didn’t go to series. But here was something completely new, where we could finish an entire series, be done with it, and they could say no, now it’s a tax write-off, and no one is ever going to see this again. It’s really a cynical practice, to devalue the work of artists that make them profit.”
Saved By Roku
After being tossed aside by Disney, however, The Spiderwick Chronicles was saved by an unlikely entity — The Roku Channel.
Photo: PCMag.com
With its limited library of original content, getting The Spiderwick Chronicles was a major coup for Roku. It also saved the series from never being seen. Coleite was ecstatic.
“It wasn’t just that we got to be saved,” he said. “It was that the work of the 300 artists who came together to make this show was going to be seen and not just tossed in a waste bin.”
Photo: Disney+
Ahead of the show’s Roku premiere last week, Coleite worried that the narrative surrounding the show was that it must be bad. After all, Disney had thrown the series away. To avoid this, Coleite went on the offensive, reaching out to publications and speaking openly on social media.
“I know everyone loves a failure in Hollywood, but that’s not the case with this story,” he added. “This was not a reject by Disney. That’s not why it was canceled.”
A Win For Everyone Involved
So far, the decision to save Spiderwick has paid off handsomely for Roku. While the streamer has not released specific numbers, Roku says that Spiderwick was watched by “millions of streamers” and had the best first weekend of any on-demand title on the Roku Channel.
Photo: Roku
While Roku hasn’t committed to a second season of the series, Coleite remains thrilled that audiences got to see the show after all.
Photo: Disney
“This is the show that will not die,” he said, laughing. “It will not succumb to anyone’s cancellation. It is manifesting itself into existence and it will survive.”
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