Picture Credit: Freeform
Coming up on its tenth anniversary, the sci-fi fantasy series Shadowhunters: The Mortal Instruments has just confirmed it’ll be departing Netflix in all international regions on January 1st, 2026, with your last day to watch being New Year’s Eve. The series is labeled a Netflix Original in those international territories, with Netflix having picked up new episodes weekly throughout its run on the US network, Freeform.
Based on the massive YA book franchise The Mortal Instruments by Cassandra Clare, the series follows 18-year-old Clary Fray (Katherine McNamara), whose life is upended when she discovers she is part of a long line of human-angel hybrids who hunt demons. Thrust into the “Shadow World,” Clary joins forces with the snarky and charming Jace Herondale (Dominic Sherwood) and the rest of the squad to navigate a dangerous underground filled with warlocks, vampires, and werewolves.
The series departure comes some 7 years after the fourth and final season (labeled season 3B) dropped on Netflix in international regions beginning weekly on February 26th, 2019.
It never made its way to Netflix in the United States, with the series instead locked throughout its run and, to this day, on Hulu.
Shadowhunters ended on a somewhat premature note, given that it was canceled at Freeform and concluded with a two-hour finale instead. As we mentioned at the time, the cancellation was largely Netflix’s fault, as they were no longer covering the series’ costs after their Constantin output deal ended. Despite a massive, globally trending fan campaign—the infamous #SaveShadowhunters movement—the show was ultimately never renewed for future episodes.
While we didn’t get viewership figures at the time, we do know the series continues to rack up significant viewing hours thanks to the Netflix Engagement Reports. From January 2023 through June 2025, the series picked up 34.7M views.
This show was one of many throughout the 2010s in which Netflix acquired international distribution exclusively, though that practice has mostly gone away. Firstly, it’s gone away because Netflix itself is more focused on its own slate of titles for global release, and the market for this type of distribution has largely disappeared, thanks to many of the producers and distributors of these shows now having global footprints through their own streaming services.
As always with the New Year, there’ll be a lot of turnover on Netflix’s library with shows and movies rotating off the service. If you’re in the UK, you’ll also see the removal of Suits, Friends, Rick & Morty, The Big Bang Theory, Mad Men, and Law & Order. The US will see the removal of series like Evil, School Spirits, Lost, and Tacoma FD.
Are you going to miss Shadowhunters: The Mortal Instruments when it leaves Netflix?
