Adi Shankar to Adapt “Hyper Light Drifter” for Television

Being an iconoclast has its advantages.

Television producer Adi Shankar is a provocateur for our times. Whether it’s starting a bootleg universe of fan films for properties as diverse as the Punisher, the Power Rangers, and Mr. Rogers, or starting an incendiary screenwriting contest asking fans to rewrite controversial Simpsons character Apu, Shankar seemingly has the Rumpelstiltskin-like ability to spin controversy into cash. His radical reinterpretations of franchise fare have landed him jobs on the most recent Dredd reboot and three separate videogame adaptations (Castlevania, Devil May Cry, and Assassin’s Creed) for Netflix. Well, now it’s time to add a fourth to that list.

As confirmed by Shankar himself in an interview with Polygon, he has been placed at the helm of an anime adaptation of Alx Preston’s smash, auteur, action RPG Hyper Light Drifter. Shankar, commenting on the difficulties of adaptation, says “For a series, the question is: how do you sustain and keep your attention on a non-interactive run? Does it get really, really dark and serious? Does it have some levity?” Videogame adaptations have long been the scourge of popular media, but reviews for Castlevania may mark Shankar as something of a curse-breaker.

Shankar is scant on details for the new show, however. The series doesn’t even have a distributor yet (though Netflix is a pretty safe guess) Additionally, He’s unsure how much dialogue he will add to the mostly wordless story of the source material, and he’s still in the early stages when it comes to deciding an art style, but Shankar has promised to “make it cool”. If his past work is any indication, that’s one thing we can take to the bank.