Dungeon Crawler Carl, a LitRPG fantasy/sci-fi series of books by Matt Dinniman, is one of the breakout hits of the decade.
“An alien invasion has wiped out most of humanity and any survivors are forced to fight for their lives on a sadistic intergalactic game show. Sounds bad, right? Now try doing it with bare feet and a stuck-up, self-centered, tiara-wearing talking cat as your partner. Welcome to Dungeon Crawler World: Earth, where the apocalypse will be televised … and Coast Guard vet Carl finds himself stuck with his ex-girlfriend’s award-winning show cat, Princess Donut the Queen Anne Chonk, as they try to survive the end of the world, fighting monsters, aliens, an insane A.I. and even other survivors … all for the sake of good TV. Survival is optional. Entertainment is not.”
With eight of the planned ten books released, it has captured the attention of the science fiction and fantasy communities, to the point where Hot Topic is carrying themed t-shirts that reference the books.
Think about that for a moment: it’s a book series, and it’s so popular there are t-shirts. The last time anything like this happened was in 1998, 28 years ago, when the world figured out that Harry Potter was something worth reading.
Matt Dinniman, the author of the book series, has just announced on Threads (and likely other social media as well) that negotiations with NBC’s Peacock streaming service have finally been successful, and that a TV series based on the books is officially greenlit.
Said Dinniman:
Surprise! I’m happy to announce that our friends at Peacock have officially greenlit the Dungeon Crawler Carl television series! Me, Chris Yost and Seth MacFarlane and his team at Fuzzy Door are all really excited to get to work. In the coming weeks I’ll have more details, and if you’re going to SDCC be sure to catch me and Chris on our DCC panel. In the meantime I wanted to thank you, the fans, for helping make this happen.
Dinniman also previously addressed the concerns of fans who were worried about the prospect of a live-action series versus an animated one, given the fantasy nature of the books. But Dinniman expressed his confidence in MacFarlane’s ability to bring the books to life.
“[We’re] not going to do it if it’s gonna look like absolute shit,” he said. “And they will do CGI testing on Princess Donut and stuff like that. And that’s all I can say, I think. It’s all gonna hinge on what it looks like. But Fuzzy Door, specifically, if you watch ‘Ted’ or ‘The Orville,’ you’ll see that they know what they’re doing when it comes to this.”
The TV series is being written by film, TV and comic book writer Chris Yost.
The series pickup caps a wild seven-year journey for Dungeon Crawler Carl, which originated in 2019 with vignettes Dinniman self-published on a digital platform as a hobby while not busy with his main job as a sketch artist at cat shows.
No word on when the show will debut yet—it’s still early days, and there’s a lot of screenwriting and preproduction to do first.
