Netflix has quietly confirmed that its beloved Japanese sci-fi thriller Alice in Borderland has come to an end, months after the release of its third season.
An adaptation of the popular Japanese suspense manga by Haro Aso, the series — about an obsessive video gamer forced to compete against his friends in deadly games in order to survive in a strange, emptied-out version of Tokyo — first debuted on the streamer in December 2020.
Throughout its time on the platform, it had amassed a considerable global viewership. In fact, according to a recent Netflix report announcing that the third season of Alice in Borderland was indeed its last, the season had been viewed 25 million times.
The streamer gave no explanation about its apparent cancelation, though numerous fans on X have insisted that the third season was marketed as its final as the series had reached “the end of the original manga run.”
“The series was planned for three seasons, and this has now simply been confirmed,” one fan posted. “Personally, I wouldn’t have needed a third season.”
“The story was over,” a second agreed, while a third explained: “The main story ended with season two and then there was a short spin off, or whatever you wanna call it, that was material for season three. But that’s it. It was always going to be a limited series, rightly so.”
The Independent has contacted Netflix for comment.
The series, which features Japanese stars, including Kento Yamazaki, Tao Tsuchiya and Nijirō Murakami, has been likened to Netflix’s record-breaking, Emmy-winning South Korean series Squid Game.
When writing about the rise in shows about human bloodsport, The Independent’s Annabel Nugent argued that Squid Game and Alice in Wonderland “bear a striking resemblance.”
Squid Game, which premiered nearly a year after Alice in Borderland, similarly follows a group of money-strapped individuals who willingly partake in life-or-death children’s games for the chance to win a life-changing sum of money.
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Nugent noted, however, that there are differences between the two. “Alice in Borderland is more sci-fi, for one thing,” she added. “While the worlds of Alice in Borderland and Squid Game are different,” she said, “their stories — of relationships, treachery, betrayal, sacrifice — are one and the same.”
Alice in Borderland was a serialized manga series that ran for 18 volumes from 2010 to 2016. It was later adapted into a three-episode video animation released between 2014 and 2015, before Netflix debuted its live-action series in 2020.
