Here’s an intriguing story: Blizzard’s enormously successful games Diablo and Overwatch might get their animated TV shows. This potentially juicy news comes courtesy of Gamespot, whose contributor visited the LinkedIn profile of Nick van Dyk, co-president of Activision Blizzard Studios who previously produced Skylander Academy for Netflix. Van Dyk’s description of his position within Activision mentions working on a Diablo animated adaptation in anime style. Furthermore, it claims that van Dyk developed and sold an animated series based on Blizzard’s Overwatch franchise. While Gamespot did contact a representative of Activision, so far the company neither confirmed nor denied the existence of these projects.
Blizzard has dabbled in movies before. In 2016, Duncan Jones (Moon, Source Code) directed an action fantasy film Warcraft, based on Blizzard’s MMORPG World of Warcraft and earlier real-time strategies set in the same universe. Released by Legendary Pictures, the film was a mixed success, both critically and commercially. It grossed $439 million on a $160 million budget – not enough to launch a new movie franchise as some executives hoped. However, adapting popular Blizzard franchises like Diablo or Overwatch into animated shows might be a significantly safer bet. After all, streaming services like Netflix thrive on providing precisely this kind of specialized content.
While many fans would be more than happy about these projects, we’ll have to wait and see if anything will come out of them.
