When Kingdom Hearts was first announced as a PlayStation 2 game about 20 years ago, it sounded insane. An action RPG collaboration between Square Enix and Disney in which the worlds of Final Fantasy and Disney collide? How’s that going to work? I’m honestly still not sure, but the surreal concept was a smash hit, spawning a thirteen game series in which hero Sora and his buddies Donald and Goofy journey through worlds based on iconic Disney movies.
The most recent entry in the series was last year’s PlayStation 4 game Kingdom Hearts 3. This was a barnstorming success, selling 5 million copies in its first week of release, making it the both the fastest and best-selling in the franchise’s history. And now it seems that Disney wants to capitalize on its popularity.
Sources close to WGTC – the same ones who told us the Mouse House is doing a live-action remake of Robin Hood and that a She-Hulk show is coming to Disney Plus, both of which were correct – say that the studio is developing a Kingdom Hearts TV series for their aforementioned streaming service. There are no specifics of exactly what this would be just yet, but the basic idea is that it’d feature Sora, Donald and Goofy journeying through various Disney movie universes.
Given how notoriously tangled up the game’s plot has become, my hunch is that a TV show would be a reboot of the concept rather than a continuation of the current story. In addition, I’m betting that (as with Kingdom Hearts 3), we probably won’t be seeing any Final Fantasy characters making an appearance.
Then again, the Final Fantasy VII Remake has itself just been a big hit and Cloud, Aerith, Cid, Yuffie and Sephiroth all showed up in Kingdom Hearts, so perhaps it’s not beyond the realms of possibility that they may make quick cameo appearances. Still, even if they play it safe, the legacy of the game series means that this is likely to be a very unique and weird show. And personally, I can’t wait.