Citadel: Amazon’s expensive lesson that no amount of money can make a generic spy franchise successful

The ambition was grand, the execution, not so much.

With the second, and potentially final, season of Prime Video’s mammoth action franchise, Citadel, arriving with not a bang but a whimper, it’s a damning indictment on what was once going to be the future of the streamer.

Rewind three years and Citadel was supposed to be a big deal, a tentpole, if you will. The kind of project that will attract new subscribers, a declaration that Prime Video was taking its commitment to audiences very seriously.

The concept was this: a spy thriller starring two actors with international appeal – Priyanka Chopra and Richard Madden – that features Bond-esque glamour, Bourne-esque set-pieces and Le Carre-esque intrigue.

A spanking new not-cinematic-but-streaming narrative universe with international spin-offs that tied back to the mothership story. Law & Order had its cities-based siblings, but this would be global.

To do that, then Amazon MGM Studios boss Jen Salke recruited a creative team with experience of working at that kind of scale, Anthony and Joe Russo, who at the time was working with Marvel on the Avengers movies.

The budget was enormous for that first season with reports as high as $US300 million, and the marketing campaign to launch it all was commensurate with its ambitions.

There were glitzy red carpet premieres in London, Los Angeles, Mumbai* and Rome, lots of pop-up activations, press, promotion and advertising.

Season two arrived last week without any fanfare. Chopra, Stanley Tucci and Ashleigh Cummings attended a small advanced screening. Chopra and Madden shared some customary posts on Instagram but Tucci did not add anything to his grid, which was already packed with Devil Wears Prada 2 and Tucci in Italy season two pointers.

There were no late night TV show appearances, no cover stories, no splashy interviews and no social media games involving chicken, lie detectors or British snacks. Nothing. It’s almost as if Prime didn’t want anyone to notice.

After a week in release, it is ranked number two on the platform behind new episodes of The Boys final season, but very few people are talking about it.

That was one of the problems with Citadel. For all that money and effort, it never penetrated the cultural zeitgeist. If people watched it (apparently it has been Prime’s fourth most-watched original series around the world), they didn’t care to shout about it, at least not in English-language markets.

Well, hang on, wasn’t this meant to be an international play? It was. Before the first season of Citadel launched, Prime had already commissioned two spin-offs, an Italian one and an Indian one, and it had also committed to a second season of the main series.

Chopra was a huge star in her home country of India, where there are more Prime Video subscribers than there are Netflix ones, before she broke through the American market in 2015, and her casting was meant to signal Citadel’s wider ambitions as a globe-spanning franchise.

The international spin-offs, Citadel: Diana (the Italian one) and Citadel: Honey Bunny (the Indian one), came out in quick succession in late-2024 and had reportedly done well in those local markets but, again, didn’t set the world on fire. Filming was already underway in the UK on the main series’ second season.

It would never shake off the perception that it was a far too expensive franchise for the returns it was barely generating.

When Salke originated the idea in 2018, it was the height of Marvel Studios’ commercial power, and connected cinematic universes were an asset, not the albatross it has morphed into.

Now, audiences are exhausted by the idea that you should or need to watch all the titles in a franchise to understand what’s going on in the next. Even Marvel has backed off that philosophy with its streaming shows increasingly disconnected from the movies and from each other. No more homework, Marvel has had to promise time and again.

One of the other reasons Citadel ended up such a fizzer was not within its control, and it had a lot to do with the kind of franchise it had aspired to be: James Bond.

Amazon bought MGM Studios in 2022, and with that acquisition it got its hands on the Bond screen rights, but it didn’t have creative control, which was held by Eon Productions’ long-time stewards, Barbara Broccoli and Michael G. Wilson.

It took several years of behind-the-scenes wrangling for Amazon to wrest creative oversight of Bond, and a month after the deals were signed, in March 2025, Salke was shown the door. Several reports suggested that Broccoli and Salke had clashed over the future of Bond.

Three weeks after that, the Citadel spin-offs, Diana and Honey Bunny, which had been on pause were now cancelled, and season two of the main show had its debut pushed from late-2025 to now.

Technically, Citadel as a whole has not been axed. But it’s hard to see a world where Prime would continue with an unsustainably expensive Bond copy when it now had control of the real thing.

Certainly in its first season, Citadel was about as generic as a spy thriller could get. A rivalry between two non-government espionage networks (one bad, one good, but also maybe neither are either), spies with wiped memories and double personalities, trying to uncover a conspiracy, it had all been done.

The key within this genre isn’t about doing something new, but doing it with style and distinction, and Citadel had neither. It relied too heavily on action set-pieces and not enough on writing or characterisation. It even made Tucci seem dull, which should be impossible.

It also had a problem in Madden, whose wooden performance as Mason Kane dragged down the show’s energy.

Madden, whose casting likely had something to do with his name being in the mix for Bond some years ago, is not an uncharismatic person. There are videos online of him being sparkly, actually smiling, during interviews and on talk shows.

But the choice to direct him as dour, with as much charm as dead fish, is unkind to him and to the audience. Mason Kane, in either of his personalities, is not someone whose fate you care about, and it’s not a character you can hang a TV franchise off of.

The second season had undergone reshoots which, depending on who you believe were either extensive (The Hollywood Reporter) because post-Salke execs didn’t like what they saw, or par for the course (Chopra).

Either way, it is an improvement on the first, in large part because the production expanded the cast to add Irishman Jack Reynor and Brit Matt Berry, who are both undeniably magnetic and brought to the proceedings what was sorely needed: people who remembered to have fun in a spy caper.

But it may not be enough to save it, especially without its protector in Salke.

Citadel was an expensive lesson that a franchise which originated from a suit in a corner office rather than from filmmakers, designed to plug a corporate hole, and not because it’s a story that needed to be told, isn’t good enough.

No matter how much money you throw at it.

*The writer, in a previous role, travelled to the 2023 Mumbai premiere of Citadel as a guest of Prime Video