It's official: Castlevania showrunner Adi Shankar is making a Devil May Cry show, as the next part of what he's referred to as "the bootleg multiverse." After weeks of teasing, Shankar made the announcement today via IGN, and we're incredibly excited.
When we chatted with Shankar a while back about Castlevania and his movie Bodied, we asked the showrunner about how he approaches video game adaptations. Obviously, we were hoping to get a hint to how he might tackle his next show, which at the time was rumored to be a Zelda adaptation. Although it turned out to be Devil May Cry, we weren't disappointed.
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Now Playing: Netflix's Castlevania Explained: From Video Games to Anime
"Absolutely, there's a philosophy I have about [making game adaptations], and it spurred out of my Bootleg Universe short films," Shankar told us. Bootleg Universe is Shankar's YouTube channel featuring unauthorized short films starring pop culture characters like Punisher, the Power Rangers, and Mr. Rogers.
"Those were made because I was a fan of the thing," he said. In addition, he recruited other people for those projects who were either fans of the franchise and its characters, or of the genre he was working with for each specific short film. Shankar's Punisher film Dirty Laundry, for example, is essentially a Western, so the people who worked on it included both Punisher fans, and fans of Westerns.
"So I realized through this process, and I had this epiphany a few years ago, that there was this big business dichotomy between the feature stuff and the fan films," Shankar said. "The fan films were real and fun and passion and fan service in the best possible way." And he decided that should be the norm: "the idea that it's made by fans, for fans. I think that is a core component, in fact it is one of the most important components, of the whole thing."
"Now, that may seem super obvious," he continued. But it's not. Shankar shared that he was originally supposed to do a Castlevania adaptation back in 2012, shortly after that year's well received Dredd movie, on which he served as executive producer. But that version of Castlevania was very different from the Netflix show that fans love. "It wasn't the script, it wasn't the team, it wasn't any of the same people involved, and it was a live-action Castlevania," Shankar said.
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"That version of Castlevania would have been closer to the Underworld series or the Resident Evil series," he continued. "And it was very clear right away that the thing that was being leveraged here was the title Castlevania...the idea was to bring in that completely different audience than the core one that loved the games."
So you have to be a fan of the game to do the adaptation justice. But that doesn't mean you can't change anything. That's clear when you look at Castlevania. The Netflix show uses elements from Castlevania III, Castlevania: Lament of Innocence, Castlevania: Curse of Darkness, Castlevania II: Simon's Quest, and more. It remixes and changes the source material significantly, expanding on the characters and altering the story. But it keeps the spirit of the games alive, and that may be the true key when it comes to adapting Devil May Cry.
"I don't think you as a gamer, me as a gamer, we're not saying, 'Hey, don't change anything. It has to be the exact same thing,'" Shankar said. "In fact, we want things changed, right? I mean, you look at the things like the Tomb Raider film that just came out, which was basically a shot for shot remake of the game--we want things changed, we want things different. But only true fans are going to know what's changed and what's not changed. Only a true fan is going to know what are the beats that are meaningful and what are the beats that are not meaningful."
Despite his success adapting games so far, though, Shankar admitted there's no one right way to do it. "There's no blueprint on how to do it, because they're all so different," he said. "In the same way that's there's not one way to adapt a book because there's so many different types of books, there's not one way to adapt a video game because these are different stories, they're different worlds and different things are important in different universes."
The Devil May Cry series has a rich history that includes various iterations on its characters, places, and more. If Shankar approaches the DMC show the same way he did Castlevania, he'll likely draw inspiration from different games over the years while still telling a unique story. And if it turns out to be anything like Castlevania, we're looking forward to it.
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