Last week, Netflix released the second season of its Castlevania series, an animated adaptation of the third game in the series. If you haven’t watched it, it’s really good, though the pacing kind of builds to a cathartic climax almost to a fault.
Now, Castlevania showrunner and producer Adi Shankar is hinting that he has another video game adaptation to bring to life and rumors are swirling that it might be The Legend of Zelda. In an Instagram post last night, Shankar left a bit of ambiguity to what the series might be, but was pretty clear that something game-related will be revealed soon.
“I can confirm that I’m working with an iconic Japanese gaming company to adapt one of their iconic video video game series into a series,” Shankar wrote late last night. He goes on to add that he’ll announce it on November 16 and captions the image with the information that Castlevania’s success created this opportunity.
Following this, entertainment website The Wrap says that they exclusively learned that the series Shankar is referring to is Nintendo’s The Legend of Zelda, the 30-year old adventure series starring Link, Zelda, and most commonly the villainous Ganon.
Whispers of Nintendo working with Netflix to bring about a Legend of Zelda series have been heard since at least 2015. At the time, the late Nintendo president Satoru Iwata expressed a desire to license out Nintendo IPs for things like movies and theme parks, culminating in Nintendo striking a deal with Universal Studios for a Super Nintendo Land, as well as a Mario movie with animation studio Illumination. Netflix denied that such a deal for Zelda was in the works.
For his part, Shankar has never publicly mentioned Zelda as one of his dream projects, but was vocal last year of wanting to adapt Metroid instead. Of course, given Shankar’s reputation for adapting projects with a darker tone, which worked out quite well for Castlevania, it might not be a Nintendo property at all. Or perhaps Nintendo is actually giving the green light for a darker take on Zelda or Metroid or whatever this ends up being.
We’ll find out for sure on November 16.
