As we sit here on 6/29/15, four episodes from the end of Season 1, Lucha Underground has yet to be renewed.
Rumors have flown over the past few months from Lucha Underground possibly being 'promoted' to Univision, to El Rey dropping the English language version of the show due to expense, to the show scouting new locations for a second season.
Here's what I can tell you:
We should hear something soon. If the goal of the show is to start its second season in October (which is when it launched last year), then they need to be shooting in August. And to prepare to shoot in August, they need some type of announcement so they can start putting in the preparation work for the shoot (including running off hordes of homeless living in Dario Cueto's sacred temple). The longer this goes without an announcement, the more likely it is the show will either be cancelled, or at least placed on hiatus, to return at a date later than October 2015.
Here's what I can tell you:
- In the run up to the AAA Lucha Libre World Cup, both Dorian Roldan, an owner of AAA and EP of Lucha Underground, and Hijo Del Fantasma (aka King Cuerno), did interviews for MLW, and both pointed to June as when the decision on the future of Lucha Underground would be announced, both making it sound very optimistic. We are now one day from the end of June, and nothing has been announced.
- Wrestling Inc posted an "exclusive" report saying that they're "hearing" that the second season will begin in August (and hilariously, that their set, a warehouse in Boyle Heights, has been taken over by vagrants since they stopped shooting). However, no one else has reported this, and the wording of the report avoids definitively saying the show has been renewed, so take that for what it's worth.
- Lucha Underground talent is very nervous over the fact that they haven't been definitively told anything yet. Most, if not all, of the talent work indie dates and would like to set up their booking schedules if LU is on hiatus. However, the belief is that if LU has a second season, it will shoot in August and September, and talents are contractually obligated to LU first, meaning they have to wait and see what happens before booking their schedules. As you could imagine, the longer the uncertainty is dragged out, the more uneasy it is for them.
- A Redditor posted a sample of Lucha Underground's ratings on El Rey. I've been tracking LU's ratings as posted on Awful Announcing since the cutoff date of May 6th on the Reddit post and the ratings have pretty much held consistent. The fact of the matter is LU does somewhere in the neighborhood of 100,000 for both the first run and the replay (which would be primetime on the West Coast) for their El Rey broadcast.
- How the show does on Unimas is more difficult to tell. The only credible report I've seen in relation to that comes from PWTorch, in which LU cracked 200,000 on Unimas two out of three measured weeks, topping out at 250,000 for the 1/7/15 broadcast.
We should hear something soon. If the goal of the show is to start its second season in October (which is when it launched last year), then they need to be shooting in August. And to prepare to shoot in August, they need some type of announcement so they can start putting in the preparation work for the shoot (including running off hordes of homeless living in Dario Cueto's sacred temple). The longer this goes without an announcement, the more likely it is the show will either be cancelled, or at least placed on hiatus, to return at a date later than October 2015.