Michelle Yeoh as Mama Sun in The Brothers Sun – Picture: Michael Desmond/Netflix
Netflix kickstarted the year with a new action comedy series headlined by Oscar-winning actress Michelle Yeoh that follows a family deeply embedded in crime. Will The Brothers Sun be back for a season 2, though? The answer is no with the show being officially canceled in March 2024.
Filmed over four months, the new series came from Brad Falchuk, best known for collaborating with Ryan Murphy on several shows. This serves as his first significant breakaway, and the show was one of the first significant TV releases of 2024 for Netflix, launching on January 4th, 2024.
The Brothers Sun has been a hit with critics, with an 85% RottenTomatoes score at the time of publishing, allowing it to get a Certified Fresh rating. Audience scores are equally impressive, with a 93% on RT and 7.7/10 on IMDb.
The Brothers Sun isn’t currently renewed for a season 2
Official Renewal Status: Canceled
Our Renewal Prediction: Leaning Cancelation.
Shortly after updating our renewal predicting to leaning cancelation, Deadline confirmed that the series would not return late on Friday night on March 1st. All the trades then echoed the cancelations but didn’t dive into why the show got canceled.
As we covered in our guide to renewal decisions at Netflix, the short of it is that the show needs to meet or exceed certain expectations on Netflix’s own internal metrics, which are then compared against the cost of a second season.
Ahead of the cancelation, people involved with the show were optimistic about the prospect of future seasons. Speaking to Digital Spy, Sam Song Li told the outlet, “I think everybody on The Brothers Sun team absolutely thinks that there’s more to tell,” adding, “Luckily, it’s not a limited series, so there is potential for future seasons.”
How well is The Brothers Sun performing on Netflix so far?
We can look into how well the show performed on the streaming service using various sources.
Let’s begin with Netflix’s top 10 data, released every Tuesday. Releasing the Thursday means that in week 1, it qualified for four days in the top 10s, where it ranked fifth on the TV English side, getting 30.2M hours watched or 4.1M views. The show spent five weeks in the global top 10s, picking up 126.10 million hours watched or 17.20 million completed viewing equivalents. Here’s how that breaks down week-to-week:
| Week Period | Hours Viewed | Views / CVE | Rank | Week in Top 10 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| December 31st, 2023 to January 7th, 2024 | 30,200,000 | 4,100,000 | 5 | 1 |
| January 7th, 2024 to January 14th, 2024 | 50,500,000 (+67%) | 6,900,000 | 2 | 2 |
| January 14th, 2024 to January 21st, 2024 | 19,700,000 (-61%) | 2,700,000 | 5 | 3 |
| January 21st, 2024 to January 28th, 2024 | 14,200,000 (-28%) | 1,900,000 | 6 | 4 |
| January 28th, 2024 to February 4th, 2024 | 11,500,000 (-19%) | 1,600,000 | 7 | 5 |
Few notable red flags here. That’s not a solid first-week performance despite rising 67% in week 2. Another red sign is that the viewing hours dropped 61% in week 3. Anything over 50% is usually a red flag, but when the hours were that low in the first place. That is not a good sign.
Let’s stack that up with other titles using the views (or, as we refer to it, completed viewing equivalents) and see how it’s comparing in its first week.
When compared to other debut shows released on a Thursday, we can see that the show falls very much towards the bottom of the pack, getting slightly more viewership than Survival of the Thickest and Unstable but less than Obliterated (which also didn’t score a season 2 renewal and actually had higher ratings than The Brothers Sun in the long run) and My Life with the Walter Boys.
Moving over to 28 days, here’s how the show stacks up against other Netflix series, with bars in green being renewed titles and those in red being canceled.
Data from FlixPatrol allows us to see how sticky the show was in the Netflix top 10s and where it performed best. The graph below shows that the show peaked as the third biggest show on Netflix six days after release and quickly began dropping off. A month and a half after its release, the show had left Netflix’s top 10s altogether. From the heatmap, you can see the show performed best in the US, France, South Africa, Portugal, Pakistan, and some Asian territories.
Picture: FlixPatrol
How about looking at external signals on performance?
The YouTube trailer for the show performed well for the series, with just over 2M views, which has often been cited as indicative of performance on Netflix.
TelevisionStats.com has the show peaking as the third biggest TV show between January 6th and January 7th and is now at number 8 at the time of publishing. It gives the series a “High Engagement” score.
Google Trends suggests the show is on the come down after a week on the platform already, with interest on the search engine dwarfed by Fool Me Once but more comparable to the likes of My Life with the Walter Boys and Obliterated.
Google trends data for The Brothers Sun, Fool Me Once, My Life with the Walter Boys, and Obliterated.
What to Expect From The Brothers Sun Season 2
Warning: Spoilers below – don’t read if you haven’t watched all eight episodes.
Picture: Netflix
By the end of episode 8, titled Protect the Family, things had come to a head with the Sun family, with Charles having received the order to kill his young brother, but he ultimately decides to stand with his mother and Bruce. With the ensuing shootout, Bruce then confronts Big Sun, who gives him the opportunity to betray his family and join the family gang, but he, too, stands by his sibling and shoots Big Sun but not fatally.
The ending of the episode sees Big Sun in hospital with insulin being slowly pumped into him, likely leading to his demise as he’s been incorrectly marked as diabetic, leaving Eileen as the likely successor to the throne. She decides to take the opportunity and announces that she’ll be headed to Taiwan to take the reigns of the family business.
The end sees Charles and June joining Eileen and setting the stage for whatever season 2 will hold.
Did you want to see The Brothers Sun return for another season? Let us know in the comments down below.
Netflix Synopsis: "When a mysterious enemy targets his family, a Taipei triad member heads to Los Angeles to protect his strong-willed mother and oblivious younger brother."
