Final Fantasy 14 live-action TV series officially “dead”

A Final Fantasy 14 live-action TV series is now confirmed to be “dead” due to the “size and scale needed to do it right”.

The series was previously announced as a collaboration between Sony Pictures Television and Hivemind, the company behind Netflix’s The Witcher series.

However, Hivemind co-founder Dinesh Shamdasani has now confirmed in a post on X, formerly Twitter, the project is no longer in the works.

“Dead,” he said in a response to a fan question about the project’s progress. “We took around a fantastic pilot script by Ben Lustig and Jake Thornton along with a multi-season plan they built with our show runners but got rejected across the board.”

He added: “The size and scale needed to do it right proved too much for anyone to want to risk.” However, “Amazon came closest” to backing the project.

Thornton also replied, and noted the project was hindered by the Covid-19 pandemic. “We took it out just as studios began to zip up their purse strings,” he said.

Back at the Final Fantasy 14 Fan Fest in Las Vegas last year, the game’s director and producer Naoki Yoshida was asked about bringing the story to other media, including a possible TV show.

“If I’m allowed to be the overall production, as well as the overall supervisory director, then I would love to have a Final Fantasy 14 TV series,” he said. “As you know my title is producer/director of Final Fantasy 14, I’m also the head of Creative Business Unit division three, I’m also a board member. So I don’t think I can squeeze in being a director of a TV series.”

Yoshida said Square Enix is “quite open to offers” to see the MMORPG in another medium, but admitted nothing has followed through to concrete discussions.

He continued: “If the 14 team becomes committed to a project like that, we want to make sure that we’re not destroying the image that we have built, or that players have built in their minds, of what Final Fantasy 14 should be, no matter what the medium would be.”

At the same event, Yoshida even compared the game to a TV series due to its story through lengthy expansions. ” I think it couldn’t be easier to recommend for [new players] to just start at the beginning and take it from there,” he said.

Final Fantasy 14’s next expansion, Dawntrail, is set to release this summer as “the very best summer vacation”.