One of Adi Shankar’s biggest stylistic influences is Sephiroth, the silver-haired bad guy from Final Fantasy VII. “It’s true,” he tells USA Today. “I’m drawn to anti-heroes with a strong point-of-view. Sephiroth is from an era where ‘bad guys’ felt one-dimensional across all media and in video games they felt especially mustache twirly. From a style perspective, I feel like the Final Fantasy series in its futurist dystopian entries had amazing fashion that I would – and do – replicate with my own spin.”
It shouldn’t come as a huge surprise. Shankar was born in 1985 – prime time for having “Sephiroth” as your Runescape handle at some point in your life.
The executive producer on Dredd – a faithful and brilliant movie adaptation of the 2000 AD comics series – is no stranger to video games. “I’d like to see Judge Dredd as a DLC character in a Mortal Kombat or an Injustice game,” Shankar says. “I’d also love to see a Judge Dredd skin in Superhot. As for a standalone game, I think the open world-ish FPS hero shooter route would be cool and the fine folks at Gearbox would do a stellar job.”
Shankar also worked as showrunner and executive producer on Netflix’s Castlevania animated series, but he’s since attempted to sue the production company for leaving him out of the spinoff series.
“Without getting into the weeds on dirty laundry, [writer] Warren [Ellis] and I did not have a good personal or professional relationship after Season 3 and 4 commenced, and we stopped communicating directly around mid-2019,” Shankar explains “It turned ugly very fast. The wonderful folks at Netflix attempted to mend the bridge, but there is beef there.”
Fortunately for the filmmaker, who rose to prominence thanks to a collection of bootleg adaptations, he’s got plenty more to work on. Right now, much of Shankar’s attention is on a Devil May Cry anime series, written in collaboration with Alex Larsen, the writer behind Netflix’s Yasuke.
“I feel like I can meaningfully contribute to the lore of the series,” Shankar says. “Devil May Cry has unique iconography and emotionally engaging lore. As a media property, it’s also not rigid the way something like Call of Duty is. The characters in DMC have an operatic depth and they experience growth across the series so it’s fun to – in a Marvel Cinematic Universe: Phase 3 kind of way – play with and explore that depth through the lens of psychological realism and dissect the trauma buried below the surface of that depth.”
Outside of that, he’s also creating PUBG and Captain Laserhawk projects. However, these will be different from his usual adaptations, since they’re not technically adaptations at all. Instead, they are “universe and lore building exercises.”
“My PUBG project is progressing very nicely,” he says. “We’re moving at hyper speed. The management and creative team at Krafton are brilliant.”
Video game movie adaptations are notoriously a bit rubbish, but Castlevania felt like a seismic shift. Not only did it understand the source material, but it was enjoyable even if you didn’t. There’s no doubt that the quality of video game movies and TV is on the rise. With the upcoming launch of HBO’s The Last of Us series, it’s likely that trend will continue.
Shankar believes modern entertainment delivery systems are what turned the tide, allowing shows based on video games to reach the audience they deserve.
“The advent and proliferation of streaming are allowing content to become more specific,” he explains. “The rise of brands and the fandoms around those brands becoming the dominant cultural forces have shifted the economic paradigm we live in. Also, the cost of making narrative content is plummeting and the cost of matching that piece of content to a prospective viewer who will enjoy it is also plummeting. So it’s now possible – and even favorable – to make something for a specific audience and for that audience to find that piece of content with relative ease. In the past, making a project based on a game meant having to dilute that game and streamline its eccentricities for the sake of mass appeal. Today, however, it’s actually advantageous to own a specific and vocal demographic.
“The Gungrave anime, Street Fighter II: The Animated Movie, and Night Warriors: Darkstalkers’ Revenge are all great and seminal works in their own right. They weren’t just amazing translations of the source material, they were the source material. Had a global streaming apparatus like Netflix existed at the time of their release, one or all of those projects would have been the Castlevania watershed moment that broke out into the mainstream-adjacent instead of being relegated to underground ‘deep cuts’.”
Being a fan of Sephiroth, Shankar knows all about deep cuts. You’ll be able to see more of his work when Devil May Cry and the PUBG project launch down the line.
Written by Kirk McKeand on behalf of GLHF.
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