The Final Fantasy 14 live-action TV series is "dead" according to its studio's co-founder

Final Fantasy 14's Tataru staring menacingly at the screen
(Image credit: Square Enix)

The previously announced live-action Final Fantasy 14 TV series is now "dead," according to its studio's co-founder. 

Back in 2019, it was announced that a TV adaptation of Final Fantasy 14 was on the way from Sony Pictures Television, Square Enix, and production company Hivemind - the studio behind Netflix's The Witcher series. Not much was known about the project other than that it was set to feature an original story and take place in Eorzea.

Now, almost five years after the show's announcement, one of the co-founders of Hivemind has called time on the long-awaited TV show. "Dead," Dinesh Shamdasani responds to a fan who asks what happened to the project. "We took around a fantastic pilot script by Ben Lustig & @jakethornton along with a multi-season plan they built with our showrunners but got rejected across the board."

As for why the series got rejected by so many companies, Shamdasani explains: "The size and scale needed to do it right proved too much for anyone to want to risk," before revealing: "Amazon came closest." 

Replying to Shamdasani's tweet, screenwriter Jake Thornton added: "It was a real result of Covid unfortunately. We took it out just as studios began to zip up their purse strings." Unfortunately, it looks like we won't be getting that Final Fantasy 14 series any time soon. 

There is some good news for fans of the broader Square Enix series though. Earlier this month it was revealed that Final Fantasy founder, Hironobu Sakaguchi, is writing a new game - the only problem is he's still playing too much Final Fantasy 14 to give a lot of updates on this right now. We've also got Final Fantasy 7: Rebirth right around the corner, which is set to release on February 29, 2024.  

As revealed last week, Final Fantasy 14 Dawntrail is bringing back the MMO content everyone is missing from Endwalker.

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Hope Bellingham
News Writer

After studying Film Studies and Creative Writing at university, I was lucky enough to land a job as an intern at Player Two PR where I helped to release a number of indie titles. I then got even luckier when I became a Trainee News Writer at 12DOVE before being promoted to a fully-fledged News Writer after a year and a half of training.  My expertise lies in Animal Crossing: New Horizons, cozy indies, and The Last of Us, but especially in the Kingdom Hearts series. I'm also known to write about the odd Korean drama for the Entertainment team every now and then.