Get ready to watch a guy with a tie and weird helmet huddle in a bush for an hour until everyone else is dead. Krafton, the company behind PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds (PUBG), has announced that the game is becoming an animated series with the help of producer Adi Shankar. The studio and Shankar have agreed to a deal that will see Shankar create and showrun the series.
Shankar is an obvious choice for a project like this as he already successfully brought Castlevania into the world of animation for Netflix, delivering a mostly praised four seasons. He’s also just plain good at creating genre and nerd stuff with films like Dredd, The Grey, and Killing Them Softly to his name. He’s partly producing the upcoming Far Cry spin-off spin-off Captain Laserhawk: A Blood Dragon Remix for Netflix as well.
“As a player, I’ve been crushing the competition in the Battlegrounds since PUBG released in 2017,” said Shankar. “I’m grateful to KRAFTON for the trust and confidence they’ve placed in me to execute my vision as a filmmaker and I’m excited to embark on this journey together. To me, this animated project represents another step in the evolution of mending the torched bridge between the games industry and Hollywood. I look forward to revealing to everybody what winning a chicken dinner looks like.”
PUBG is trying to move into the broader cultural spectrum on a number of fronts outside of this animation by establishing a (sigh) PUBG Universe. The studio has produced two short films with some big-name stars already, Ground Zero starring Don Lee and a mockumentary series starring Jonathan Frakes called Mysteries Unknown: Birth of the Battlegrounds. Whether this new animated show will tie into the interconnected PUBG storyline that has been set up isn’t known, but most likely it will all be connected. In any case, the most bizarre and interesting PUBG spinoff is probably upcoming survival horror game The Callisto Protocol.
