There’s a lot of video games set to get TV or film adaptations in the next few years, and even more that seem like they’d be ripe for the picking. Bungie’s Destiny franchise seemed like a viable candidate, especially after the studio was acquired by PlayStation in 2022, but it sounds like any plans to bring the games to a new medium are have currently been dashed.
According to Forbes’ Paul Tassi earlier in the week, Bungie was reportedly “tossing around” ideas for an animated Destiny series on Netflix before things fell apart.. Allegedly, this was in development prior to the aforementioned PlayStation acquisition, during which Sony said it would help Bungie “nurture the IP they have in a multi-dimensional manner.” (For extra context, this statement was made a few weeks before the Uncharted movie released and became a decent box-office success.) In regards to why it didn’t go forward, Tassi wasn’t sure, though he did say it just may not have gone farther than the scripting phase.
Before Sony bought Bungie, the developer brought on Derrick Tsai as its transmedia head. Tsai was a producer and director at Riot who helped pave the way for Arcane to get made and become a hit over at Netflix. He departed around this time last year, after which the studio hired Warner Bros. alum Gabriel VanHuss to serve as the Destiny’s head of linear media. VanHuss holds that position to this day, and his duties involve expanding the franchise in TV, comics (which it’s previously done), movies, and so on. It’s hard to know where this hypothetical show currently stands: Bungie’s currently focused on the Final Shape expansion dropping in June, its new Marathon game, and still reeling from its highly publicized layoffs (to say nothing of possibly working on Destiny 3). According to Tassi, if the hypothetical show isn’t fully dead, it’s not coming “anytime remotely soon.”
The idea of Destiny getting a TV show seemed like a cool idea two years ago, but it’s a little more dicey now. Bungie’s hoping to turn things around for both Destiny 2 and the company at large with Final Shape, and revealing a TV show weeks after the expansion drops could easily take things from “we’re so back” to “oh, it’s over” in a heartbeat. The series certainly has the potential to thrive in other mediums, but it’ll unfortunately have to be a waiting game until the smoke clears around The Final Shape.
[via Eurogamer]
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