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Luminate counts 41 percent of Netflix's 2025 US slate as quietly unrenewed
The 32-page report sets 41 percent unrenewed against 11 percent cancelled outright. It also lists Wonder Man at 52 percent retention, two points above the threshold the industry treats as a renewal, among the shows that ended.
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What happened
- Data intelligence company Luminate has published a 32-page report on the wave of cancelled TV shows across streaming, broadcast and cable, with data starting mainly in 2022 and ending in 2025.
- A freshman scripted streaming show's chance of reaching a second season ran between 48 and 55 percent across the four years the report covers.
- Wonder Man sits on Luminate's list of recently cancelled streamer series with 52 percent retention and about 6.5 million estimated views, the third-highest retention in that group.
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Why it matters
- constraint Anyone quoting retention as a renewal forecast is using a metric that sorts a slate; something else decides the renewals, so second-season planning needs a second input.
- exposure Kids animation is where the exposure concentrates: with streaming and cable at near or below 25 percent as of 2025, a creator pitching there should plan for one season and be surprised by two.
- cost A cable producer's odds now turn on which owner they signed with, since AMC's renewal rate fell 27 points in a year while Disney's moved two.
- precedent Once a tracker separates quiet non-renewal from announced cancellation, any tally built only on announcements understates how many shows actually stopped.
A cancellation gets a date and a statement. A non-renewal is an option that lapses, and Gizmodo, summarising Luminate, called that quiet ending a cheat in Netflix's cancellation count [6]. The volumes are far apart: unrenewed runs about 3.7 times cancelled-outright in the 2025 figures [1]. Gizmodo's excerpt does not break out whether the 41 percent includes the 11. If they are separate counts, 52 percent of Netflix's 2025 US slate ended without a renewal once planned endings are set aside [2].
Planners working on a second season while the first is still airing look at retention. The rule of thumb in Gizmodo's summary is that 50 percent or better usually earns a show its way back [10]. Wonder Man was two points clear of that and ended [4]. The floor of the same list is 30 percent, AppleTV's The Last Frontier [9].
Luminate wrote that Netflix "outranks all of its competitors both proportionally and in raw numbers when it comes to renewals" [5], and it has Netflix renewing nearly or more than half its scripted and unscripted work across the period [2]. The pairs Gizmodo prints do not line up that neatly year by year: Netflix was 19 points ahead of Paramount in 2023 and 13 points behind Prime Video in 2024 [3].
I would take the report's explanation for broadcast into a planning meeting. Luminate credits broadcast's stronger renewal record partly to "often more straightforward programming decisions...and uncomplicated viewership data" [13], while calling cable a "veritable ghost town" as NBC and Disney pull back [14]. Where the viewership number is simple, everyone in the room knows what the show had to beat.
Planning against a published threshold takes two checks: whether the show clears the bar, and whether anything that cleared the bar was killed anyway. A show at 52 percent retention cleared it and was cancelled [8]. The bar is a record of past decisions. In the best of Luminate's four years, 45 percent of freshman scripted streaming shows still did not reach a second season; in the worst, 52 percent [5].
What to watch
- Luminate called the outlook on 2026's TV slate "not encouraging" on first-half data; the full-year counts will show whether streaming renewals kept sliding.
- Whether adult animation on streaming, down in premieres and renewals every year since 2021, stops falling.
- Luminate said it would be "not surprising" if cable continued with its "dire" renewal rate; the next report tests that.