Final Fantasy XIV won’t be the next video game TV series, as The Witcher producers' live-action project “dead”
rockpapershotgun.comA planned live-action adaptation of MMO Final Fantasy XIV is officially “dead”, according to the TV series’ producers. A combination of the pandemic and the “size and scale needed to do it right” are apparently to blame, with Amazon reportedly coming closest to making it a reality - but to no avail.
The live-action FF14 series was announced back in 2019 as a collaboration between Sony Pictures Television and production company Hivemind, known for working on series including Netflix’s The Witcher and The Expanse. It would’ve been the first time that the world of Final Fantasy had been seen in live-action, following CG feature films such as Spirits Within and Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children.
“This show is about embracing and embodying all of the elements that have made the mythos such an endlessly captivating phenomenon,” Sony Pictures’ co-president Chris Parnell said at the time. “It’s an immense honour to be bringing all of Eorzea’s iconic characters, settings, and concepts - including fan-favorites like Cid and, of course, the chocobos - to life for a television audience."
The adaptation got as far as a pilot script from writers Ben Lustig and Jake Thornton that Hivemind co-founder Dinesh Shamdasani described on TwiXer as “fantastic”. (Thanks, Eurogamer.) The pilot was accompanied by plans for multiple seasons put together with the series’ showrunners, but the ambitious vision was “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,” Shamdasani replied in response to a question about the series’ status, stating bluntly that the project was now “dead”.
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.
Thorton also replied, saying that the impact of the
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