Netflix’s Fate: The Winx Saga was cancelled, and while this seemed like bad news for the possibility of future Winx-related content, it is actually good for the franchise. Fate: The Winx Saga is a teen drama show based on the animated series created by Italian animator Iginio Straffi, Winx Club, co-produced by Rainbow SpA, and later Nickelodeon. Fate: The Winx Saga follows Bloom, a teenager who finds out she is a fairy, as she moves to Alfea to learn to control her powers and discover her origins. Throughout its first and second seasons, Fate tracks the adventures of Bloom and her friends as they face various threads and enemies.
After the debut of Fate: The Winx Saga season 2 on Netflix, show-runner Brian Young announced the news of the show’s cancelation on Instagram, revealing that Netflix would not go forward with Fate: The Winx Saga season 3. Despite the platform’s good viewership and positive audience feedback, Fate: The Winx Saga was not renewed for a third season. The exact reason for the cancelation of the show was not shared, but this could be a testament to the fact that the number of streamers simply didn’t meet Netflix’s goal to continue the series. Fate: the Winx Saga getting cancelled may be influenced by the production cost of the show’s visual effects.
Why Fate: The Winx Saga Didn’t Work
Fate: The Winx Saga was subject to plenty of criticism from the very beginning. Firstly, the show was accused of whitewashing its characters, since Musa is East Asian in the cartoon, unlike her live-action counterpart who is played by a white character. Similarly, in the first season, Flora, a Latina fairy, seemed to have been replaced by a white character with the exact same powers. Admittedly, Fate: The Winx Saga season 2 did fix the injustice of not having Flora in the live-action by maintaining her Hispanic ethnicity and introducing such a key character who was much beloved in the original show.
However, adding Flora seemed not to be enough to save the show. In fact, Fate: The Winx Saga did change the source material in many significant ways. The overall tone of the show is much darker in order to create a young adult adaptation of what once was a lighthearted cartoon for kids. Similarly, the villains in the live-action show are completely different and much more sinister and gloomy than they were in the original Winx Club. Evidently, the show seems to have disrupted the very aspects that the viewers of the original source material loved about the Winx Club because of the many changes Fate: The Winx Saga made to the original cartoon.
Fate: The Winx Saga’s Cancelation Can Save The Franchise
Despite its flaws and cancelation, Fate: The Winx Saga ultimately helped the franchise. The two seasons of Fate: The Winx Saga may have paved the way for a future adaptation of the cartoon that will be more accurate to the source material. As such, any future media product associated with the Winx franchise can use Fate: The Winx Saga and the controversies around it as a lesson. Not only does the cancelation of the show function as a reminder that the franchise will not end just because the series did, but Fate: The Winx Saga proves that overusing archetypes and radically changing the source material are not going to create a satisfying adaptation.
In an interview with Variety, Straffi revealed that he is currently working on a new Winx movie with over a $100 million budget. He said that this will be “a Winx movie, rather than a Fate movie,” perhaps suggesting that the film will actually learn from the mistakes of its predecessor. Thanks to Fate: The Winx Saga and the criticism surrounding the show, the Winx Club cartoon may finally get a faithful adaptation, one that will feature all the Winx fairies and will return to the colorful and light elements that many loved from the Winx cartoon.
Fans Are Still Trying To Save Fate: The Winx Saga
Fans aren’t taking the Fate the Winx Saga cancelled news lying down. Fate: The Winx Saga was canned with its last episode airing on September 2022. Despite that, midway through 2023, fans were still petitioning to save the show. The fact that Warrior Nun was saved, partially thanks to a fan campaign, fans of Fate: The Winx Saga might be more optimistic about this show. The show had 151 million hours viewed in its first 28 days, which is rather high. However, after two seasons, the cost of the show might have been what shut it down at Netflix. Despite that, as Warrior Nun showed, there could be someone willing to put up the money to get these viewers.
Alas, the chance of Netflix bringing it back is almost non-existent. When Netflix cancels a show, it moves on rather quickly. The streaming giant has a lot of shows and movies in production, and it closed the door on Fate: The Winx Saga. While Warrior Nun is coming back, it is not likely to be on Netflix. With Fate: The Winx Saga season 2 ending with a cliffhanger, fans want another season, if only to properly end the story. There is a petition (via change.org) that has more than 140,000 signatures so far. The petition for Warrior Nun only had 123,817 signatures, so there might be hope for Fate: The Winx Saga season 3 after all.
This story originally appeared on Screenrant
