According to an interview with Deadpool director Tim Miller, himself and David Fincher were only able to get Netflix’s animated anthology series Love, Death, & Robots off the ground because of the irreverent R-rated superhero movie’s unexpectedly huge success upon its 2016 release. Debuting in 2019 and soon to release its second season, Love, Death, & Robots is a Netflix anthology series that brings to life standalone sci-fi, horror, and fantasy stories via a wide variety of animation styles.
The show is the brainchild of Deadpool director Tim Miller, and in a recent interview, the helmer admitted that the unexpectedly huge success of that Ryan Reynolds-starring superhero hit was instrumental in getting the series off the ground. Although Alien 3 helmer David Fincher was attached to the series from early on, it was not until after Deadpool succeeded that Love, Death, & Robots came into being thanks to Miller’s newfound popularity increasing interest in the project.
The animated anthology series sees different directors and animation studios use different styles and aesthetics to tell standalone sci-fi stories (with some horror and fantasy episodes), but the varying episode length of Love, Death, & Robots, along with the always-risky anthology format, was quick to put off some potential investors and studios despite the involvement of Fincher and Miller. The fact that the show would feature unconnected stories concerned some studios, while others could not wrap their heads around a show whose duration varied from episode to episode. Luckily, according to a recent interview with Miller, the fears of producers were soon assuaged by the outsized success of Deadpool which, due to its adults-only rating and light, meta-comedic tone, some had predicted would flop at the box office upon its 2016 release.
In a 2019 interview with The Observer, Miller explained: “Deadpool had just come out the weekend of, so what does David do? David calls and says, ‘OK, so we’re going to use your newfound popularity to get our anthology movie made,’ and then literally like two weeks after that he said, ‘(…) Let’s just take it to Netflix, because they’ll let us do whatever we want.’ And here we are.” The Social Network director, who recently helmed the Citizen Kane making-of movie Mank, is credited as an executive producer on Love, Death & Robots, whereas Miller plays a more active role in the show’s production as an executive producer, a writer, and a director. In practical terms, much of Miller’s job on Love, Death, & Robots involves sourcing the original stories that many of the shorts on the show are adapted from, making the series something of a passion project for the former VFX artist.
Interestingly, Miller himself doesn’t seem to have had the same luck with his later projects. Although Deadpool 2 did well at the box office and earned solid reviews upon its 2018 release, it was directed by Atomic Blonde’s David Leitch rather than Miller, and Miller’s most recent blockbuster outing Terminator: Dark Fate was a plothole ridden underperformer that turned Schwarzenegger’s once-terrifying titular android assassin into a mild-mannered suburban drape salesman named Carl. Viewers may be eager to see the series return to screens soon, but it is more than a little ironic that Deadpool got Love, Death, & Robots the go-head, while Miller’s first foray into directing live-action robots ended up flopping at the box office later the same year.