No summer romance! The Bachelor: Summer Games has been canceled by ABC, Us Weekly can confirm.
The spinoff, which was never officially announced, would’ve featured an international cast and aired during the 2020 Tokyo Olympics in July.
ABC producers had been planning a summer edition similar to the 2018 Bachelor: Winter Games, which ran at the same time as the Winter Olympics in PyeongChang, South Korea, but Us has confirmed that the coronavirus pandemic has halted the potential Bachelor Nation spinoff.
The Tokyo games have been postponed until July 2021, but there is no word on whether Bachelor producers will resurrect Summer Games next year to coincide with the new dates.
An ABC executive previously spoke about the possible cast for the summer show, naming Hannah Brown as a potential contestant.
“Hannah B has also said, ‘I find this interesting,’ because she likes to win,” SVP of Alternative Programming for ABC Entertainment Robert Mills said during SiriusXM’s March 3 episode of The Bachelor Recap radio show. “She likes to win.”
Mills told fans during an appearance on the Ringer’s “Bachelor Party” podcast last month that he would also “love to see” Jordan Rodgers or Colton Underwood take part in the show. (Underwood, 28, is currently recovering from coronavirus).
Even though the men are both in relationships, with women they met on The Bachelorette and The Bachelor, Mills was open to Rodgers’ fiancée, JoJo Fletcher, making an appearance and shaking up the past format of the competition series.
“I think it’s going to be really fun,” the exec said during the February podcast. “We found a really great place to hold it. I mean, it’s going to be so fun seeing these people in these great, you know, track and field and swimming. This is a real Olympics.”
Bachelor: Summer Games is the latest show on ABC’s slate to be switched due to COVID-19.
Season 16 of The Bachelorette featuring Clare Crawley opted not to begin filming after the virus began to spread in March.
“There have been no confirmed cases of COVID-19 on any of our productions, but the health and safety of our employees, casts and crews remains our top priority,” Warner Bros. Television Group told Us in a statement on March 13.
A few days prior, Chris Harrison told Entertainment Tonight on March 11 that The Bachelor: Summer Games was “highly unlikely” to move forward because a “key component of [the show] is getting foreigners in our country.”
The Bachelor Presents: Listen to Your Heart is still set to premiere on ABC on Monday, April 13, at 8 p.m. ET.
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