A Castlevania TV Show Is Headed To Netflix This Year

Netflix will release a new TV series based on Castlevania sometime later this year, the company announced today.

Unfortunately, there aren't many official details to be had at this point. As part of a series of announcements it made today, a Netflix press release listed something called Castlevania Season 1, Part 1 as launching in 2017. The team behind it includes Adi Shankar (who was responsible for the excellent 2015 Power Rangers short film) and comic veteran Warren Ellis.

"Inspired by the classic video game series, Castlevania is a dark medieval fantasy following the last surviving member of the disgraced Belmont clan, trying to save Eastern Europe from extinction at the hand of Vlad Dracula Tepe himself," an official description reads. "The animated series is from Frederator Studios, a Wow Unlimited Media company, written by best-selling author and comic book icon Warren Ellis and executive produced by Warren Ellis, Kevin Kolde, Fred Seibert, and Adi Shankar."

This same project was actually hinted at last year. Seibert, a producer on Adventure Time, was a guest on the Nick Animation podcast in December (via Slashfilm). During it, he mentioned that he was at work on something "based on one of the most world-famous video games of the last 30 years." Earlier in the year, Shankar actually said on Facebook that he was working on a Castlevania series with Seibert.

"I'm producing a super-violent Castlevania mini-series with my homies Fred Seibert and Kevin Klonde," Shankar wrote at the time. "It's going to be dark, satirical, and after a decade of propaganda, it will flip the vampire sub-genre on its head."

Given how long Castlevania has been around--it originally debuted in 1986--there has been surprisingly little in the way of non-game adaptations. Konami hasn't announced any new games in the series. The most recent, Lords of Shadow 2, came out nearly three years ago. Meanwhile, Koji Igarashi--the man behind the franchise's most celebrated game, Symphony of the Night--is working on his own spiritual successor, Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night.