Nintendo allegedly canned The Legend of Zelda Netflix series after news leaked

You might remember, back in 2015, several reports emerged that Netflix was working with Nintendo to produce a live-action Legend of Zelda series. Mere weeks later, it seemed as if this exciting project was nothing more than wishful thinking. Well, in today’s hot gossip, it is being reported that the Zelda series was indeed in the works, but Nintendo cancelled the project after its existence was leaked to the press.

The intriguing new tidbit comes from U.S. comedian Adam Conover, dating back to a time when Conover worked with viral website CollegeHumor. According to Conover, the CollegeHumor team were working on a series of StarFox skits that featured stop-motion animation, similar to Wes Anderson’s 2009 movie, Fantastic Mr. Fox. These skits had Nintendo’s backing, with Shigeru Miyamoto himself visiting the CollegeHumor offices.

But speaking on podcast TheSerfTimes yesterday, (as noted by superrerogatory), Conover recounted how, out of the blue, the plug was abruptly pulled on the StarFox project. You can hear Conover’s recollections in the clip below at around the 39:45 mark.

“Suddenly there were reports Netflix isn’t doing this Legend of Zelda anymore. I was like ‘what happened?'” remembers Conover. “And then I heard from my boss we’re not doing our StarFox anymore […] He was like, ‘oh, someone at Netflix leaked the Legend of Zelda thing, they weren’t supposed to talk about it, Nintendo freaked out […] they pulled the plug on everything, the entire program to adapt these things.”

The live-action Legend of Zelda series was first brought to the public’s attention by The Wall Street Journal, who described the show as “Game of Thrones for a family audience”. Then-Nintendo CEO Satoru Iwata would go on to neither outright confirm nor deny the show’s existence when speaking with Time, but stated that “the [WSJ] article in question is not based on correct information”.

So while it appears that this now six-year story still has its own fair share of facts, rumors, misinterpretations, and secrets, the one thing we’ll ever truly gain from it is the heartbreak.

Exposing capitalism by exposing the truth [Serf Times / Eurogamer]