According to Grace Randolph, Kingdom Hearts may be adapted into a television series. In a recent Tweet, the veteran leaker and popular YouTuber maintains to have heard from sources close to Disney that the entertainment powerhouse is planning to turn the beloved video game franchise into a TV show (which We Got This Covered first told you weeks ago), one which they hope to debut on Disney+ as soon as it’s ready.
For you non-gamers out there, Kingdom Hearts is a hack-and-slash, beat-em-up game which sees Disney’s most famous mascots go toe to toe with characters from a popular Japanese video games series called Final Fantasy. Sounds weird? You’re not alone, and yet there’s a pretty good rationale for how this oddly successful combination came about.
See, in the early 2000s, Square Enix – the developers of Final Fantasy – wanted to enter the western market, but in order to do so, they needed intellectual properties with which American and European gamers were familiar. To their surprise, Disney – a company which, while incredibly popular with SQ’s target audience, usually maintains a very rigid brand identity – agreed to provide these properties, but only under the condition that their characters wouldn’t participate in fight scenes.
And so it was. Overnight, Mickey Mouse became an inter-dimensional magical overlord, and Donald and Goofy (passive) sidekicks to a young boy tasked with defeating the evil forces which slipped out from the Final Fantasy world and into the Magic Kingdom. Perhaps because of the sheer absurdity of seeing cartoon characters face off against anime bad guys, the game – along with its many sequels – sold like hot cakes.
While seeing this unorthodox formula make its debut on the silver screen is sure to excite viewers around the globe, it’s not the only surprise which Disney has in store. In the same Tweet, Randolph announced that, aside from Kingdom Hearts, a reboot of the 2001 animated film Atlantis: The Lost Empire is also in the works. Though a box office bust that heavily divided critics at the time, the film – which is way edgier than Disney’s usual stuff – has since acquired a sizable cult following, one which without a doubt can’t wait to revisit the sunken city.
