Citadel: How Amazon Wasted Hundreds of Millions of Dollars on a Franchise Nobody Cared About

This week, it was announced that Amazon has cancelled the two spin-offs of its, uh, flagship original show, Citadel. Both Diana and Honey Bunny have ended and will have the remaining narrative threads woven into the flagship show, starring Priyanka Chopra Jonas and Richard Madden. This announcement was met with a resounding ‘eh,’ followed by cries of ‘wait, those were shows that existed and aired?’ I may be one of the few people in the world who has actually watched the three Citadel series, not for my own pleasure but for work, and I struggle to remember huge swaths of these very expensive shows. The way they incited a kind of goldfish memory within me is perhaps the most impressive thing about this entire franchise.

It’s one of the costliest examples of trying to make fetch happen in the era of Peak TV, and yet I never hear anyone talking about it. Critics like me joke about how James Cameron’s Avatar seemingly left behind no cultural footprint but at least people actually saw those movies. They demonstrably found an audience, regardless of the oft-speculated apathy of those who put their money down. with Citadel, its costly existence felt more like myth than truth.

It wasn’t supposed to be this way. Amazon wanted Citadel to be a worldwide hit, the kind of multi-threaded franchise that tied together multiple strands across time, geography, and style. This was meant to be their version of the Marvel Cinematic Universe with a touch of James Bond thrown in for good measure. They even brought on board the iconic visionary filmmakers, the Russo Brothers to help bring it to life. The end result? An alleged waste of half a billion dollars.

It will surprise nobody to hear that Citadel was not a passion project by a writer or director with a vision. It came to be via the then-chief of Amazon Studios Jennifer Salke. She wanted what The Hollywood Reporter described as ‘a big title to make waves.’ So, she thought up a spy show ‘spies from key countries who come together for the ultimate mission. And cooler still, the show would generate local spinoffs, with the spy characters having their own adventures on their home turf. India, Italy and Mexico were among the countries being targeted.’ Marvel’s Avengers was brought up as a point of comparison.

Citadel would feature one sprawling narrative that would tie together across multiple shows and languages. There’d be lots of action set-pieces, deadly subterfuge and espionage drama, and, of course, hot people in the leading roles. For the central show, Amazon cast Priyanka Chopra Jonas and Richard Madden, the latter still riding that Game of Thrones high. The shoot for season one was nearly a year long.

It didn’t take long for things to go awry. The Hollywood Reporter details how a battle for creative control broke out between Visionary Filmmakers the Russo Brothers and Josh Appelbaum and Andre Nemec, the screenwriting duo who had been brought on board as showrunners. Amazon sided with the Russos and let Applebaum go, mere days before Christmas. He took with him director Brian Kirk, who helmed five of the season’s seven episodes, and line producer Sarah Bradshaw. Under Russo rule, the already-high budget ballooned, which seems to be a habit on their projects. By the time a lengthy round of reshoots was completed, condensing the season’s run to only six episodes, Citadel had become one of the most expensive TV shows ever made, with a reported budget of $300 million. The only reason it’s not number one is because Amazon blew half a billion on that Lord of the Rings show that apparently still exists.

And it was all for… eh? Citadel is, in many ways, a typical Russos project: bland, derivative, gloomy to look at but passes the time if you have no other options. I’m not sure even superheroes would elevate it. The reviews were middling, with little enthusiasm for the project. The leads had no chemistry, the plot was full-on ‘we have Bond at home’ and the action scenes were jumbled and uninspiring. It’s hard to imagine who this show was for. These weren’t characters people had any reason to care about because they were so two-dimensional, and the world they inhabited didn’t entice viewers to step in and explore.

It didn’t get much better with the spinoffs. Citadel: Diana moved the action to Italy but was practically identical to the American version. Citadel: Honey Bunny benefitted from leads with real chemistry and some better-staged action scenes but was laden down by its need to adhere to a wider narrative nobody cared about. Both shows premiered with far less hype than their anchor series.

We have plenty of examples of what happens when you try to reverse engineer the lightning-in-a-bottle mega-success of the MCU. DC tried it more than once to no avail. Other studios latched onto public domain stories in the hopes that audiences would want lengthy multi-film franchises that would last for a decade onward. They all failed. Remember the Guy Ritchie version of King Arthur? Or Taron Egerton’s Robin Hood? They all stumbled at the first hurdle, and with good reason. They thought they could go straight to The Avengers on the first film, making an establishing narrative that existed solely to set up five or six follow-ups nobody ever expected or wanted to see. The MCU worked because it took its time, and because people enjoyed the films that set up the core characters as stand-alone efforts without having to worry about a glut of precedence to study up on (it’d take a few phases for the series to become that overwhelmed.) You could watch Iron Man as its own thing because it existed for reasons beyond forcing you to focus on six other non-existent plots.

So much of Citadel feels like it was made out of contractual obligation. It’s not a show laden with potential but even the most incurious writer could surely jazz up this concept beyond what Visionary Filmmakers the Russo brothers offered. Perhaps a more challenging political slant to this story of international spies forever meddling in world affairs. Or at least some sexy banter between two leads who look like they actually have conversations with one another.

One area that felt desperate for development was in this international quality. Surely one of the cool things you could do with this concept is let local filmmakers experiment with their own style or play around with that of their cinematic history? Imagine if the Italian Citadel was as pulpy and pop art as Danger: Diabolik. Or Honey Bunny felt like RRR. But in this case it was all very Marvel: the same drab colour palettes, the same boring realist tone, and one show indistinguishable from the other. All that money and they just look like that.

You can’t force people to care about a show. Good marketing can grab people’s attention but it won’t force them to stick around if there’s no actual hunger for the story. As we’ve seen from the last few years, studios, networks and streaming services have no effing clue what will break out and what won’t. Who expected Baby Reindeer and Adolescence to become worldwide hits? We’ve moved well beyond Peak TV into the contentification of everything, and the results have been bleak. That’s what gets us the endless assembly line of regurgitated IPs, live-action Disney remakes, and Citadel.

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Amazon seems to have stopped caring about its expensive pet project right as they acquired the rights to the James Bond franchise. Now they can just turn a cinematic icon into Russo-esque slop. How thrilling for all of us (yes, I’m still mad about The Electric State, why do you ask?) Season two is supposed to be coming at some point, but we wouldn’t blame you if you forgot about it. Everyone else has.