Netflix spent $200M on Marco Polo and canceled it after two seasons

Marco Polo was Netflix's first big-budget international epic: the story of the young Venetian at the court of Kublai Khan, produced with the Weinstein Company and shot largely in Malaysia. It premiered December 12, 2014, among Netflix's earliest scripted originals, at a cost that sources later put at $200M across its two seasons.

While the show ran, chief content officer Ted Sarandos defended it by dismissing the usual metric: viewership was 'irrelevant' for a show like this, he said, because it was 'hugely popular all throughout Asia and Europe.' On December 12, 2016 — two years to the day after the premiere — Netflix and the Weinstein Company announced it would not return; sources told The Hollywood Reporter the series had produced a $200M loss for Netflix.

The cancellation later became part of Netflix's own internal reckoning. In 2019, when the company tightened greenlight standards around cost-per-viewer, Marco Polo was named as one of the misses — alongside The Get Down, which spent $120M on a single season — that taught Netflix prestige alone could not substitute for audience.