Mike Flanagan Wasn't Surprised Netflix Canceled The Midnight Club

"The Midnight Club" has officially told its final scary story. Despite the show premiering its first season on Netflix in October 2022 and quickly making history in a terrifying way, the mystery-horror series was cancelled by Netflix just two months later (via Variety). In the end, those first 10 episodes would be the only content audiences would get to see from the series.

For fans of the first season of the horror show, this news may have come as a bit of a shock. After all, the ending of "The Midnight Club" includes some fairly substantial cliffhanger teases that beg to be answered, and co-creator Mike Flanagan had been vocal about his intentions of following up with additional seasons when the show first premiered (via Variety). However, Flanagan revealed that he and his team weren't actually caught off guard by the abrupt cancellation at all, and were even rather expecting it.

In an interview with Deadline, Mike Flanagan noted that he and his creative partner Trevor Macy didn't find Netflix's cancellation of "The Midnight Club" unexpected. "When we agreed to do 'The Midnight Club,' the entire company was very different," Flanagan said. "I think we both feel it's safe to say that a show like that, which we thought was innovative and harder to classify, requires some pretty robust promotion to get off the ground properly, and Netflix's strategy for promoting new shows has changed quite a bit. So we weren't entirely surprised at all."

While the writing may have been on the wall in terms of the fate of "The Midnight Club," the duo had worked out plans for a Season 2. Following the cancellation, Flanagan made a Tumblr post outlining the broad plot strokes that a second season would have covered. "My biggest disappointment is that we left so many story threads open, holding them back for the hypothetical second season, which is always a gamble," the co-creator wrote.

"The Midnight Club" is no more, but Flanagan and Macy had already been developing alternative projects. The pair  inked a deal with Amazon Studios to produce content for Prime Video, with one of their first projects being an adaptation of Stephen King's "Dark Tower" saga. The team is also set to release another project for Netflix — an adaptation of Edgar Allen Poe's work, titled "The Fall of the House of Usher."