Citadel Spin-Off Announced By Amazon
Citadel is spinning off with Citadel: Diana, a new series arriving next year.
Amazon Prime Video’s Citadel is getting a new spin-off series called Citadel: Diana, as the company has just announced via Twitter. What’s more, the new series’ first season has already been shot and will be premiering in 2024. The move was teased in the final episode of the main series’ first season and was confirmed publicly with a tweet from the official Citadel account.
The Citadel “Spyverse,” as Amazon has termed it, has long been planned as an international, multi-series project reflecting the company’s recent ambitions to expand its presence in the streaming market and beyond, with mixed results. While it spent millions launching The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, that series seems to have been widely hated by fans. To the contrary, Citadel had the second-biggest debut Amazon has seen, seemingly justifying the expansion of its universe, in which the streamer had already invested.
Starring Matilda De Angelis, the plot of Citadel: Diana is currently being kept quiet, with the title, accompanying hashtag, and image of its star being the information all Amazon has decided to release at present. With the huge amount of capital they’ve put into their new franchise so far, we can surely expect a good bit of teasing and build-up between now and the series’ debut next year. In the meantime, Amazon’s media growth is set to continue, with the Ben Affleck and Matt Damon project Air now on Prime Video following its 45-day theatrical run.
Of course, Citadel recently made buzz of a different kind with an Instagram video from two of its stars, Richard Madden and Stanley Tucci, leading to fan speculation that Madden will be the next James Bond. Whether their martini-sipping clip was any intentional tease, much less a confirmation, has yet to be seen, but with the apparent success of the streaming series, Madden already has a career lined up as an international spy. While he will likely not be appearing in the new series, Amazon has made it clear that the Citadel universe is interconnected, leaving fans wondering how and whether all of this world-building is leading somewhere specific.
The new Citadel: Diana will certainly be a proving ground for the further success of the franchise, a speedy successor to the original in an apparently ambitious plan. Directed by Arnaldo Catinari, the series was written by Laura Colella, Giordana Mari, Ilaria Bernardini, and Gianluca Bernardini under series developer and head writer Alessandro Fabbri. The cast includes Maurizio Lombardi, Lorenzo Cervasio, Filippo Nigro, Thekla Reuten, and Julia Piaton, among others. A more complete list can be found on the series’ IMDb page.
As the Citadel Spyverse continues to expand, expect to see more series cropping up in equally short order, hopefully with the audience engagement and continued international interest to justify Amazon’s significant investment. As the cross-continental intrigue unfolds, we’ll be looking for signs of audience response, though initial reactions to the original series seem less than broadly enthusiastic. With thin reviews and a ballooning franchise budget, if Diana doesn’t show improvement over its predecessor, Amazon might soon find its spy series receiving a burn notice.
