In unsurprising fashion, Dungeon Crawler Carl is becoming a TV show. The hit book series fits two bills for adaptations. First, it’s a book series, and adaptations of those have been around for an incredibly long time. Second, it’s a book that functions like a video game, and video game adaptations are hot right now.

But there is one major problem. The series just got a huge update suggesting that it’s still all systems go, which is good news. Unfortunately, it’s still live action, which is going to create a difficult reality for all involved in the wake of some other TV news.

Why Dungeon Crawler Carl Series is Taking Way Too Big a Risk

Most adaptations of anything these days are live action. Despite animation’s advancement and its growing prestige, it’s still viewed by Hollywood as an inferior art form to live action. It’s unfortunate, and it’s going to potentially wreck the Dungeon Crawler Carl series, even if author Matt Dinniman says they won’t do it if it is going to look bad. Unfortunately, there’s a high probability that it will.

I’m only on the third book, Dungeon Anarchist’s Cookbook, but there are already so many things that just won’t translate into live action very well. And even the simple act of pulling them off at all is going to take a ton of CGI, let alone doing it well.

In Carl’s Doomsday Scenario, players get the chance to change their race and class, and a lot of them do not remain human. One of the main characters of that and the third book, Katia, becomes a sort of shapeshifter that can change what she looks like and add/subtract mass. It’s going to be borderline impossible to make that look decent in live action.

Difficulties of Adapting Dungeon Crawler Carl to TV

The NPCs, bosses, and mobs are all wacky, weird enemies and creatures. Part of what makes the books so good is the silly, outrageous descriptions of the aliens and classes of crawlers that Matt Dinniman comes up with. They’re bonkers, but they are almost impossible to conceive of in live action.

The costuming, makeup, and VFX department are going to have their hands way too full on this one. Recently, Seth MacFarlane’s production company saw Ted cancelled after Season 2. The reason given was that it’s way too expensive to produce and “there’s no way to do it at a lower cost.”

If generating a teddy bear in live action was too much for Peacock and MacFarlane’s Fuzzy Door Productions couldn’t come up with a way to make Ted and keep a reasonable budget, what on earth makes them think they’ll be able to afford using VFX and CGI for half the things in Dungeon Crawler Carl?

Dungeon Crawler Carl‘s Live Action Conversion Issue

The incessant need for everything, even previously animated projects, to be translated into live action is getting old. It has been cool in the past, and some things certainly benefit from it. But when the characters and locations are not remotely possible for real people to look like or construct, why not just make it animated?

This is the same issue that is going to plague other upcoming adaptations like The Legend of Zelda or God of War. An overreliance on CGI and VFX puts too much strain on those artists, and it creates a major risk that it just won’t look good.

In the case of Dungeon Crawler Carl, I wrote previously that it was a big undertaking to commit to adapting a 10-book series (when not all 10 are even released yet) that is one never-ending story into a TV show. The budget is going to be incredibly high for all the seasons, and while it will be popular enough to drive ratings, will it be big enough to justify what is sure to be a massive, inflated budget?

That remains to be seen, so there are actually two problems stemming from the one major concern mentioned in the title. First, that it won’t look good because live action is going to be so hard to pull off for this particular series. Second, that the budget will become too monstrous to fully tell the series’ story.

Conclusion

It is genuinely sad that Dungeon Crawler Carl may end up being the guinea pig for this, but it is possible that, in a few years, the series will be cancelled and will push adaptations more towards animation. That would be good, because animation is too disrespected and overlooked even still. However, at the cost of a fantastic book series becoming a television series, it would be a high price to pay to teach Hollywood that lesson.