That Final Fantasy 14 live-action series everyone had forgotten about is, in fact, dead
Maybe next time.
It's been a while since we last heard about a tentative Final Fantasy 14 live-action series. Turns out it's because the project doesn't exist anymore.
The disappointing update on the status of the series, which was first announced back in 2019, comes straight from Hivemind co-founder Dinesh Shamdasani via Twitter (quick hat tip to Eurogamer). "Dead", he declared regarding the show, "We took around a fantastic pilot script by Ben Lustig & Jake Thornton 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 [take the] risk. Amazon came closest."
As a refresher: The Final Fantasy 14 series was announced as a huge collaboration between Sony Pictures Television and Hivemind, the company behind Netflix's The Witcher series. It doesn't come as a surprise that budget became the massive problem between the pilot script and getting picked up properly by a streaming service. Even if Amazon came close to financing the show, the company is already backing huge fantasy TV projects such as The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, an upcoming Warhammer 40K TV series, and the live-action God of War show, which has received a series order.
Screenwriter Jake Thornton also joined the Twitter thread to add that he thought the show was a victim of the Covid-19 pandemic, as they took out the series pitch "just as studios began to zip up their purse strings." It's certainly not the first big project which got shelved during those years or as a direct result of the economic rammificiations of the pandemic.
Meanwhile, Square Enix and the FF14 team are marching ahead with the Dawntrail expansion, which arrives in summer 2024 and promises to take players to the sunny continent of Tural.