Final Fantasy 14 went down in gaming history as one of the industry’s rare successful turnabouts, but it seems its live-action series won’t enjoy the same fate. The adaptation, first announced in 2019, is now officially dead in the water, as confirmed by production company Hivemind co-founder Dinesh Shamdasani on Twitter / X.
“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 risk. Amazon came closest,” reads the post, written in response to a fan’s request for an update.
Hivemind, the company behind Netflix’s The Witcher and Amazon’s The Expanse, was tapped to develop the project alongside Sony Pictures Television.
Thornton, a scriptwriter on the project, also attributed its failure to the pandemic. “It was a real result of Covid unfortunately. We took it out just as studios began to zip up their purse strings,” he said in a separate post.
The Final Fantasy 14 series would have been the beloved game franchise’s first full-fledged foray into the realm of live action. It was reportedly in the works to tell an original story set the world of Eorzea, featuring chocobos, airships, beastmen, and of course, Cid.
This doesn’t mean there will never be a Final Fantasy 14 show, be it animated or live-action. Back in 2017, the Dad of Light miniseries followed a son-and-father pair as they reconnect through the game. More recently, director Naoki Yoshida has compared the acclaimed MMORPG to a TV show, so the possibility is definitely there.
In the meantime, players can look forward to the forthcoming Dawntrail expansion, coming to Final Fantasy 14 sometime this summer. It will offer plenty of new content, including a new Pictomancer job, the female Hrothgar playable race, and a new town and region, a new eight-player raid, and more.
Si Jia is a casual geek at heart – or as casual as someone with Sephiroth’s theme on her Spotify playlist can get. A fan of movies, games, and Japanese culture, Si Jia’s greatest weakness is the Steam Summer Sale. Or any Steam sale, really.
