Remember That Final Fantasy XIV Live-Action Series? Well, It's Dead

A previously announced live-action television adaptation of Square Enix’s successful MMO, Final Fantasy XIV, is dead in the water. So says the co-founder of the production company behind the project, Hivemind.

First announced in 2019, the FFXIV show was being developed by Square Enix, Sony Pictures Television, and production company Hivemind Entertainment—the same company behind Netflix’s Witcher series and Amazon’s Expanse show. It was planned to be a live-action series that would tell an original story set in the world of FFXIV, Eorzea. A press release in 2019 said the show would explore “the struggle between magic and technology in a quest to bring peace to a land in conflict.” When it was announced, there was no release date or even a streaming service attached. And now, after years of radio silence, the project is seemingly never going to happen, the people involved unable to find anyone willing to flip the bill for the ambitious series.

Read more

• Subway Might Be Regretting Its New Meat Slicers

• 5 players from 2018 WJC team to be charged with sexual assault

• Jon Stewart is returning to The Daily Show, part time

• MrBeast Raked In Over $260,000 Peddling Car Disinformation And Chocolate On Twitter

• R.I.P. Gary Graham, Star Trek: Enterprise and Alien Nation actor

According to Shamdasani, Amazon was the streamer who got the closest to saying yes and making the FFXIV show a reality. But it didn’t happen, partly due to its size, but also because—as explained by writer Jake Thornton—Covid threw a wrench in the works right as they were trying to sell the series.

“It was a real result of Covid, unfortunately,” said Thornton. “We took it out just as studios began to zip up their purse strings.” [Editor’s note: How do you zip up purse strings? That’s a weird bag.]

When someone asked the co-founder of Hivemind if an animated series could still happen, he tossed cold water on the idea, saying: “Harder [to be honest] and the rights are back in Japan, unfortunately.”

So ends the mostly uneventful saga of FFXIV’s live-action TV show. I do wonder, in a post-Last of Us/Witcher/Arcane world, if someone was trying to make that 2019 show today if it would have survived, found a streamer, and become a reality. But, based on some of the live-action video game adaptations we’ve gotten over the last decade, maybe we all dodged a fireball spell.

.

More from Kotaku

• The Toys We Always Wanted But Never Could Have

• Masters Of The Air review: A brutal, beautiful World War II miniseries

• 'Stupid Waste of Time': Sounds Like Subway's Expensive Automatic Meat Slicers Are a Bust

• The Icon Of The Seas Is 250,000 Tons Of Floating Carbon-Emissions Horror

• These Cars Have The Coolest Gauge Clusters

Sign up for Kotaku's Newsletter. For the latest news, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

Click here to read the full article.