A live-action TV series based on Final Fantasy 14 is no longer happening. The project is now dead, according to Dinesh Shamdasani, the co-founder of Hivemind, one of the production companies involved.
"We took around a fantastic pilot script by Ben Lustig and Jake Thornton along with a multi-season plan they built with our show runners but got rejected across the board," Shamdasani wrote on X, as spotted by Eurogamer. "The size and scale needed to do it right proved too much for anyone to want to risk."
Amazon, which spent a billion dollars on a Lord of the Rings TV show that drew large viewership figures but barely made a dent in the cultural zeitgeist, seemingly came closest to spinning up the project. Evidently, it decided against getting on board.
Dead. We took around a fantastic pilot script by Ben Lustig & @jakethornton along with a multi-season plan they built with our show runners but got rejected across the board. The size and scale needed to do it right proved too much for anyone to want to risk. Amazon came closest.
— Dinesh Shamdasani (@dinesh_s) January 23, 2024
COVID-19 also played against the show's chances, according to screenwriter Thornton. "We took it out just as studios began to zip up their purse strings," Thornton wrote on X.
The series was announced back in 2019 as a collaborative effort between Hivemind (which makes the Netflix series The Witcher) and Sony Pictures Television. Although Sony doesn't own the rights to Final Fantasy — that would be Square Enix — the Final Fantasy series is closely affiliated with PlayStation.
Sony has found success in adapting other PlayStation games for the big and small screen over the last few years, such as The Last of Us and Uncharted. But it seems turning a sprawling MMO into a TV show was just too tall of an order.
It probably doesn't help that the Final Fantasy 14 base game is notoriously a bit of a slog. So much so that players can pay to skip the first 80 levels and get to the good stuff. It feels like the equivalent of having to watch a season and a half of a TV show before it really gets going. Maybe Hivemind and Sony should try adapting a Final Fantasy game that's good right out of the gate, such as FF16.
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