Westworld In The Media

[AnimeMania]

[millennium]

Put the West back in Westworld.

[AnimeMania]

21 hours ago, millennium said:

Put the West back in Westworld.

Now it is Worldworld.

 

‘Westworld’ Season 4 Adds Ariana DeBose in Recurring Role

Ariana DeBose joins Season 4 of “Westworld” as an undisclosed character.

All eight episodes of Season 4 of “Westworld” will air at 9 p.m. on HBO on June 26 and will also be available to stream through HBO Max.

[Quilt Fairy]

On 5/10/2022 at 1:32 AM, AnimeMania said:

Now it is Worldworld.

More like WierdWorld.

[millennium]

I think Bernard is in TheRingWorld.

The rest of it looks like TheSharperImageWorld.

[BetterButter]

‘Westworld’: James Marsden Returns For Season 4; Evan Rachel Wood On Playing A New Character

[Quilt Fairy]

I am so over Season 3, it was an incomprehensible fiasco.  I don't want a Westworld set in New York f-ing City. 

But thanks for bringing back James Marsden. 

[AnimeMania]

[blackwing]

On 5/9/2022 at 11:33 PM, millennium said:

Put the West back in Westworld.

On 5/10/2022 at 1:32 AM, AnimeMania said:

Now it is Worldworld.

On 6/5/2022 at 4:06 PM, Quilt Fairy said:

I am so over Season 3, it was an incomprehensible fiasco.  I don't want a Westworld set in New York f-ing City. 

But thanks for bringing back James Marsden. 

It's more like Postapocalyptic World.  I wish we would return to the actual Worlds - Westworld, Shogun World, Warworld, whatever.  The original premise of the series.  Customers pay money to experience a world of their choosing and the various scenarios.  Whatever the mess of Season 3 was was simply ridiculous.

I am glad to see that James Marsden is coming back, but he's not even coming back as Teddy.  And Evan Rachel Wood is coming back but not as Dolores.  So they will be playing new characters.  I don't understand the point.  If they are coming back as new characters in some kind of -World simulation, then yes.  But if it's more of the same, new characters in this future modern world, then I am skeptical.

I especially don't understand how and why Aaron Paul became the lead actor.  

[millennium]

On 6/5/2022 at 1:25 PM, BetterButter said:

‘Westworld’: James Marsden Returns For Season 4; Evan Rachel Wood On Playing A New Character

Season 3 was hard to get through.   This sounds perfectly awful.   The only way I see myself watching is if I've run out of other things to watch.

Edited June 7, 2022 by millennium

[Quilt Fairy]

11 hours ago, blackwing said:

I especially don't understand how and why Aaron Paul became the lead actor. 

I couldn't for the life of me figure out his backstory last season, and there is no way I'm rewatching S3 to see if I can make any more sense out of it. 

[millennium]

On 6/5/2022 at 5:06 PM, Quilt Fairy said:

I am so over Season 3, it was an incomprehensible fiasco.  I don't want a Westworld set in New York f-ing City.

Maybe most of the action takes place at Central Park West.

[BetterButter]

[SunnyBeBe]

I just saw Evan Rachel Wood on Fallon promoting the new season.  Do I need to start with season 1 and catch up or just start with 4?  I’m not familiar with it at all.  

[Nashville]

49 minutes ago, SunnyBeBe said:

I just saw Evan Rachel Wood on Fallon promoting the new season.  Do I need to start with season 1 and catch up or just start with 4?  I’m not familiar with it at all.  

Wouldn’t hurt; the current season is scattered SO far over the entire map I’ve been tempted to re-binge the first three seasons (yes, even S3) just to regain my bearings.

[aghst]

Casey Bloys, head of HBO, was asked about WW and sounded non-committal.

Quote

What’s the future of Westworld beyond season four? Lisa Joy and Jonah Nolan’s deal includes two more seasons. Is that still the case?

Like with any show, we’ll see how it does. We haven’t talked to them about ideas for a season five, but we’re only three episodes into season four and we’ll see how it goes. No decisions have been made.

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-news/hbo-boss-casey-bloys-2022-emmys-nominations-1235179324/

Show runners are under contract for two more seasons but no discussion of season 5 yet?

Maybe he's looking at the ratings.  If something like House of Dragons, another big-budget show, does much bigger numbers for HBO, maybe they don't want to lay out big money for more WW seasons.

[Noneofyourbusiness]

Two? That's surprising. In this interview with Ed Harris posted on Independence Day this year, he says there's one more season planned, which will be filmed next spring:

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-features/westworld-ed-harris-season-4-predicament-golf-scene-1235173606/

[ShadowHunter]

Why did Westworld turn into the Aaron Paul show? Honestly he is not that good and I don't care about Breaking Bad. This is not Breaking Bad and here he sucks. Leaving the park was a fatal mistake for this series.

[thuganomics85]

These violent delights have violent ends, indeed.  Show has been canceled despite the hopes of a final season to wrap things up.  I feel like it would have gotten one years ago, but the whole Warner Brothers/Discovery merger have made it a free for all now.  Can't say I'm too torn up, but I wouldn't have minded seeing what the intended ending was.  But the show clearly never reach the heights of the first season again, and I suspect the lack of buzz and ratings didn't help.  Especially since I imagine this show cost a pretty penny.

[aghst]

Yeah maybe the WBD politics is one thing.

But the declining ratings didn't help.

Fact that Casey Bloys was noncommittal on renewal shortly after season 4 started airing might have been a tipoff.

They were said to be negotiating season 5.  But the show runners having a deal with Amazon Prime probably didn't help either.

[Welshman in Ca]

It just got harder & harder to follow what was happening, no surprise the viewing figures were down & it's now been cancelled. As someone else said they never should have left the park.

[Avaleigh]

1 hour ago, thuganomics85 said:

Can't say I'm too torn up, but I wouldn't have minded seeing what the intended ending was.  

I probably would have watched the final season but that's mainly because it's hard for me to quit a show if I think it was good at one point. I kept thinking that the show would get its groove back but between seasons 3 and 4 I think I maybe liked 3 episodes? I'm definitely not bummed about this. I would've been fine with them ending it with season 2 if I'd known what the story for the next two seasons would be.

I'll acknowledge that season 4 was better than the dumpster fire that was season 3. The episodes in season 3 just hit the same beats over and over again.

[Hiyo]

At least the core cast could be getting paid for season 5...

[ahpny]

Quote

It just got harder & harder to follow what was happening

The writers seem to have become too convinced of their own brilliance to care about making any sense at all. It's not like we got stupider and lost the ability to follow plots. Those plots became so byzantine that the little sense they ever made got washed out completely. The best science fiction is still tethered to reality to some degree. That tether here snapped long ago, and the resulting freefall wasn't all the intriguing.

I could make a similar criticism about The Matrix. Why would the machines in The Matrix enslave humanity to generate power when there are myriad other ways to make so much more power? That flaw is nevertheless excusable because the premise of The Matrix was still compelling.

Not so much here. Why would hosts "care" about anything? Why do they "have" emotions in the first place? The writers lost the predetermination thread long ago and never really replaced that with anything interesting.

[DanaK]

HBO Max is removing Westworld from its service in what may be part of end of the year financial review. I mean, HBO Max is a streaming service for HBO shows and booting an HBO show. Such head shaking decisions. Supposedly, it and other pulled shows could end up on some other part of the company including a FAST service (with commercials)

https://deadline.com/2022/12/westworld-the-nevers-pulled-hbo-max-canceled-1235197233/

[Msample]

Shows get pulled partially so they don’t have to pay residuals.

[DanaK]

12 minutes ago, Msample said:

Shows get pulled partially so they don’t have to pay residuals.

Which is a really sucky thing to do to cast and writers, especially for a 4 season show

[aghst]

1 hour ago, DanaK said:

Which is a really sucky thing to do to cast and writers, especially for a 4 season show

It's also really sucky for long-time subscribers.

There may be people who meant to watch this, figured they would always be able to.

What if you want to go back watch Six Feet Under or some other great shows which didn't have a huge audience?

Some channels like Showtime I think sold some of their older shows to other services so you can't watch those on their service either.

[DanaK]

7 hours ago, aghst said:

It's also really sucky for long-time subscribers.

There may be people who meant to watch this, figured they would always be able to.

What if you want to go back watch Six Feet Under or some other great shows which didn't have a huge audience?

Some channels like Showtime I think sold some of their older shows to other services so you can't watch those on their service either.

Definitely bad for subscribers. I dropped off watching after the first season but I had hoped to maybe catch up later on the subsequent seasons. Guess not though. I guess $15 a month isn’t enough to get them to keep their shows available on streaming. Hopefully they’ll find some way to let subscribers have access to at least the HBO original shows they’ve removed, even if through an ad-supported service. Maybe this nonsense will stop once they’ve substantially paid down their 3 billion in debt they got saddled with in the merger

[blackwing]

I hated Season 3 so much that I've been delaying watching Season 4.  Guess I'll have to start pronto and hope I can finish before it disappears from the Max.

[Anela]

On 12/13/2022 at 12:05 AM, aghst said:

It's also really sucky for long-time subscribers.

There may be people who meant to watch this, figured they would always be able to.

What if you want to go back watch Six Feet Under or some other great shows which didn't have a huge audience?

Some channels like Showtime I think sold some of their older shows to other services so you can't watch those on their service either.

I wanted to watch it. I watched season one, when I had a free trial in 2017, then part of season two another way. I wanted to watch legally, so I waited until I could pay for it. Now I hear that they're pulling shows. If they keep it up, I'm going to have to find alternative ways of watching them again, and cancel the service. There's no point in keeping it, if they're just going to fill up on discovery shows that I have no interest in.

[DanaK]

2 hours ago, Anela said:

I wanted to watch it. I watched season one, when I had a free trial in 2017, then part of season two another way. I wanted to watch legally, so I waited until I could pay for it. Now I hear that they're pulling shows. If they keep it up, I'm going to have to find alternative ways of watching them again, and cancel the service. There's no point in keeping it, if they're just going to fill up on discovery shows that I have no interest in.

This Deadline article indicates pulled shows could show up on 3rd party FAST services or whoever the producing studio wants to shop it to https://tvline.com/2022/12/14/westworld-the-nevers-move-free-streaming-services/

Clearly, this doesn’t help you with the service you are paying for. Do you only watch HBO shows through HBO Max or do you also have the linear channel? I got access to HBO Max as part of my getting HBO on my cable. I had intended to use Max to not only watch the Max originals but also older HBO shows and newer ones I didn’t want to record to watch now but maybe eventually watch at a later time, like later seasons of Westworld. I guess that’s not a fool-proof plan at this point

[LoveLeigh]

After season 1, this show declined. It lost it's way. I thought there would be a season 5 because I think after the last season they showed a teaser indicating the show would get back on the original storyline track. I read the actors would be paid regardless.. so maybe they started filming and shelved it? I also saw a release scheduled for 2024... so maybe they got canceled, packed up, and just all went home.

Edited December 16, 2022 by LoveLeigh

[Anela]

On 12/14/2022 at 10:43 PM, DanaK said:

This Deadline article indicates pulled shows could show up on 3rd party FAST services or whoever the producing studio wants to shop it to https://tvline.com/2022/12/14/westworld-the-nevers-move-free-streaming-services/

Clearly, this doesn’t help you with the service you are paying for. Do you only watch HBO shows through HBO Max or do you also have the linear channel? I got access to HBO Max as part of my getting HBO on my cable. I had intended to use Max to not only watch the Max originals but also older HBO shows and newer ones I didn’t want to record to watch now but maybe eventually watch at a later time, like later seasons of Westworld. I guess that’s not a fool-proof plan at this point

We have the streaming service. We hadn't had HBO for years, because we couldn't afford all of the additional channels. We got rid of cable later in 2020, and I signed up for the half-price HBO deal, September 2021. I kept it, because I liked it, and wanted to watch older shows I'd never seen (or that were now gone from Prime, where I'd started a few, when I first got that). I got hulu and netflix for the same reason: they own certain shows and movies, so they'd always be there. 

[DanaK]

On 12/16/2022 at 2:50 AM, LoveLeigh said:

After season 1, this show declined. It lost it's way. I thought there would be a season 5 because I think after the last season they showed a teaser indicating the show would get back on the original storyline track. I read the actors would be paid regardless.. so maybe they started filming and shelved it? I also saw a release scheduled for 2024... so maybe they got canceled, packed up, and just all went home.

One of the entertainment articles mentioned HBO offered a 5th season but on a FAST service but the creators turned it down because it would have meant a major budget cut

[Quilt Fairy]

On 12/17/2022 at 7:48 PM, Anela said:

I got hulu and netflix for the same reason: they own certain shows and movies, so they'd always be there. 

Slightly off-topic, but you need to be careful about this assumption.  Streaming services usually buy broadcasting rights for a specific time period, so even things they've had for years many suddenly disappear.

[DanaK]

On 12/13/2022 at 10:31 AM, blackwing said:

I hated Season 3 so much that I've been delaying watching Season 4.  Guess I'll have to start pronto and hope I can finish before it disappears from the Max.

Too late...

[blackwing]

16 minutes ago, DanaK said:

Too late...

I finished it, I watched the whole season in 5 days! 

[DanaK]

1 hour ago, blackwing said:

I finished it, I watched the whole season in 5 days! 

When you said you had to start watching pronto, I guess you really meant it lol

[blackwing]

On 12/20/2022 at 12:46 PM, DanaK said:

When you said you had to start watching pronto, I guess you really meant it lol

Haha, yep.  I'm still not really sure what was happening and why it was happening.  I still don't understand how Teddy made his way into the world Christina/Dolores was in, did she will him there, or was he all just in her head?  I've never felt so stupid or confused watching a show.  

I just wish it had gone back to the Westworld of Seasons 1 and 2.  Robot hosts go amok, humans die, humans try to fight.  Was much simpler to understand.  Then Season 3 came along and it all went downhill.

[DanaK]

It looks like Roku has made a deal with Warner Bros Discovery to have several Warner-branded FAST channels on Roku to be available in the Spring that will include several Warner titles including the Westworld series among others. Note, these programs will stream for free but will be ad-supported

http://thefutoncritic.com/news/2023/01/31/roku-locks-fast-deal-with-warner-bros-discovery-for-the-roku-channel-new-fast-channels-will-feature-popular-titles-including-westworld-the-bachelor-cake-boss-say-yes-to-the-dress-f-boy-island-and-more-426215/20230131roku01/

 

Note that Tubi will be doing the same thing, essentially sharing the titles https://variety.com/2023/digital/news/roku-tubi-warner-bros-discovery-free-fast-channels-westworld-1235507747/

[BetterButter]

Jonathan Nolan still wants to finish Westworld

[Quilt Fairy]

Can we go back in time and pretend Seasons 3 & 4 do not exist?