Netflix Orders ‘Exploding Kittens’ Animated Series Starring Tom Ellis and Lucy Liu; Mobile Game to Launch in May

Rita Ora has joined the voice cast of “Kung Fu Panda: The Dragon Knight” at Netflix.The pop singer will voice the Wandering Blade character, described as a “tough English bear knight that joins Po on his globe trotting adventure.”James Hong will return to the franchise, once again voicing Mr. Ping, Po’s adoptive, over-protective father who is always filled with pride for his boy.“Kung Fu Panda: The Dragon Knight” stars Jack Black as the voice of Po.

Jennifer Maas TV Business WriterNetflix has ordered a docuseries from Shawn Levy, Vox Media Studios and The Verge about how technology will affect the basic aspects of our lives in the future, Variety has learned exclusively.Titled “The Future Of…,” the show asks: “What if we could look into the future to see how every aspect of our daily lives — from raising pets and house plants to what we eat and how we date — will be impacted by technology?” Per Netflix, “We can, and should, expect more from the future than the dystopia promised in current science fiction. ‘The Future Of…’ will reveal surprising and personal predictions about the rest of our lives — and the lives of generations to come.”The series will be released globally in two batches, with the first six episodes premiering Tuesday, June 21, and the remaining six episodes on Tuesday, June 28.

A slew of upcoming kids animated series will make their debut on Netflix, including Sonic Prime, Kung Fu Panda: The Dragon Knight, Daniel Spellbound and We Lost Our Human.

Sharon Osbourne is no stranger to cancellation.

topped 120 million hours viewed with in its first three days. The latest episodes saw John Kreese (Martin Kove) bring “Karate Kid III” bad guy Terry Silver (Thomas Ian Griffith) back into the Cobra Kai dojo.

Jennifer Maas TV Business WriterNetflix’s reboot of the “Iron Chef” franchise is bringing former “Iron Chef America” host Alton Brown and Mark Dacascos, who played the iconic role of “The Chairman” on the competition, back into Kitchen Stadium for another round.The streaming service’s “Iron Chef: Quest for an Iron Legend” will see Brown return to host along with “Top Chef” winner Kristen Kish, and Dacascos reprise the part of The Chairman.Here is the official description for the “reimagining” of “Iron Chef,” which will launch on June 15: The legendary Iron Chef series is reborn with a supersized approach to the ground-breaking culinary competition that started it all. It’s been called the toughest culinary challenge a chef will ever experience.

Meghan Markle has reportedly had the production of her upcoming animated Netflix series cancelled by the streamer. It was announced last summer that The Duchess of Sussex, 40, was teaming up with the streaming giant on a series with the working title of Pearl.

Meghan Markle’s project ended up on the chopping block at Netflix!

Dead on arrival. Pearl, the animated series created by Meghan Markle, will not air after all amid cuts at Netflix.

EXCLUSIVE: Even Netflix’s in-house members of the Royal Family are not immune to a wave of cutbacks going on as the streamer recalibrates after a precipitous stock drop incurred after a drop in subscribers. Netflix has quietly dropped Pearl, the working title of an animated series that was created by Meghan Markle through Archewell Productions, the shingle the Duchess of Sussex and Prince Harry set up at Netflix in fall of 2020 to create scripted series, docuseries, documentaries, features and children’s programming. Pearl was to be Archewell’s first animated series.

Meghan Markle‘s project is going away.

Joe Otterson TV ReporterMost of the cast of “That ’70s Show” is coming back for “That ’90s Show” at Netflix, Variety has learned.Topher Grace, Laura Prepon, Ashton Kutcher, Mila Kunis, and Wilmer Valderrama are all set to make guest appearances in the spinoff series, once again playing their characters from the original series. The only main cast member not returning is Danny Masterson, who played Hyde, as he is preparing to stand trial on multiple sexual assault allegations.As previously announced, Kurtwood Smith and Debra Jo Rupp are set to star in “That ’90s Show,” reprising the roles of Red and Kitty Forman.

Jennifer Maas TV Business WriterSteve Carell’s “Space Force” has been canceled after two seasons at Netflix.The second season of the comedy, which re-teamed Carell and “The Office” creator Greg Daniels, debuted on Feb. 18.

Hulu has ordered to series We Were the Lucky Ones, a limited series from Old 320 Sycamore and 20th Television that’s based on Georgia Hunter’s bestseller about a Jewish family separated at the start of WWI yet determined to reunite. Eight episodes are planned.

Jennifer Maas TV Business WriterLimited series “Anatomy of a Scandal” has ended “Bridgerton” Season 2’s reign as the No. 1 English-language TV series on Netflix, according to the streaming service’s newly release Top 10 rankings.For the week of April 18-April 24, “Anatomy of a Scandal” was viewed for 75.6 million hours in its second week of availability, while “Bridgerton” racked up 46 million and landed in the No.

Jennifer Maas TV Business WriterIn the wake of big spender Netflix’s Q1 shocking subscriber loss news, David Zaslav made a point to say Warner Bros. Discovery “will not overspend to drive subscriber growth” during Discovery’s first-quarter earnings call Tuesday.“As you’ve heard me say, we are not trying to win the direct-to-consumer spending war,” the WBD CEO said, instead promising that the newly combined WarnerMedia-Discovery company would “invest in scale smartly.”Warner Bros.

Jennifer Maas TV Business WriterHBO’s “House of the Dragon” cost under $20 million per episode to produce its 10-episode first season, which debuts Aug. 21, a source close to production told Variety.For comparison, “Game of Thrones” cost HBO around $100 million to per season.

Jennifer Maas TV Business WriterNetflix’s “Bridgerton” was viewed for more than 2.5 billion minutes during the week of its Season 2 debut, according to Nielsen’s newly released streaming Top 10 rankings.The Chris Van Dusen-created period romance was easily the No. 1 program on streaming for the week of March 21-27 on Nielsen’s charts, even though only its first season was available for the majority of that week, as Season 2 premiered on March 25.

Apple TV+ announced on Wednesday it has ordered “Sago Mini Friends,” a new kids animated series based on the award-winning Sago Mini World app. The series for preschoolers is produced by Spin Master Entertainment and animated by Brown Bag Films, based on the characters developed by Sago Mini, including Harvey the floppy-eared dog and his best friends, Jinja the cat, Jack the rabbit, and Robin the bird.

Jennifer Maas TV Business WriterThe finale of CNN+’s “Land of the Giants: Titans of Tech,” titled “The Netflix Effect,” launches Thursday, perfect timing for an entertainment industry that is both reeling amid Netflix’s shocking Q1 subscriber miss, poor second-quarter outlook and the wait to see if CNN+ can find its groove as quickly as it might need to in order to survive.Based on the “Land of the Giants” podcast from Vox Media’s Recode, the CNN+ docuseries explores the complicated histories of Meta (a.k.a. Facebook), Apple, Amazon, Google and now Netflix.