Adi Shankar On ‘Devil May Cry' And Why Hollywood Drops The Ball

Forbes

07-04-2025

Adi Shankar has been very busy over the past few years.
Adi Shankar talks Devil May Cry on Netflix and why Hollywood keeps failing with its video game and anime adaptations.
Shortly after the launch of the Castlevania animated series on Netflix, I interviewed Adi Shankar about his role in it.
Now that Devil May Cry has received its own new animated series, Adi was kind enough to let me ask him about how that all came about.
'I fought for this one. I spent a year in the trenches negotiating with Capcom to acquire the rights, finally locking it down in 2018. Then, it became 2.5 years of literary obsession, me and my writing partner, Alex Larsen, forging the blueprint for this 'Adi Shankar's Devil May Cry' Universe. We started with a 40-page outline, then sculpted it into eight full scripts. And even after the scripts were 'done,' we kept going, draft after draft, making sure every beat felt precise, intentional, and crafted.
'When it was ready I walked into Netflix armed with a package that included the rights from Capcom, all 8 scripts, and a curated licensed song list that would become the heartbeat of season one. Dylan Thomas and John Derderian at Netflix greenlit the show on the spot. I told them my mission was to expand the scope of what adult animation can do, and they said they wanted to support that vision, and that they shared that goal.
'This show wasn't born in a boardroom. It was born in battle, and Dylan, John, and the entire Netflix team fought alongside me every step of the way. I'd go to war with them by my side again, without hesitation.
'As for why I wanted to adapt Devil May Cry, it was the fashion, the music, the characters—but beyond that, it was the cool factor. Devil May Cry has this raw, untamed cool that most video games can't touch. There's a primal electricity to it. Guns, swords, leather, demons, but under all of that, there's soul.
'It's a Shakespearean tragedy, but it's also a love story, two brothers forged by the same blood, shattered by the same loss, and driven down opposing paths by the gravity of grief. There's real emotional architecture beneath the action, the longing, the regret, the unspoken 'I miss you' buried in every strike. Their war isn't just with each other. It's with the ghosts they both carry.
'With this Devil May Cry series I'm pulling a bit from everything. What I'm building here is a new Devil May Cry animated universe on Netflix, one that distils the entire franchise down to its raw energy. It's a reinterpretation that features the youngest versions of Dante and Lady we've ever seen on screen, before the legends fully calcified.
'Devil May Cry' is doing very well on Netflix.
'I'm not recreating a single game. I'm capturing the spirit that's woven through all of them: the swagger, the sorrow, the operatic scale of it all.
'After Arcane, and Cyberpunk: Edgeruners became hits, I knew what was coming. What started as this weird, outlier success, something most executives didn't fully understand, was about to become a full-fledged business model.
'The marketplace was going to flood with adult-oriented animated adaptations of AAA video games. And I saw a future for myself where I could become a factory, pumping out anime-styled adaptations of big IP. But as I visualized that future, it felt depressingly corporate. Like I was a hamster on a wheel, running in place, churning out slightly different versions of the same product over and over.
'That's why I made Guardians of Justice and Captain Laserhawk, both were artistic attempts to break the mold. To make something distinct, while still being love letters to the video games and comic books I grew up with. I wanted to take everything that I knew 'worked', and throw it out the window. I didn't want to be part of some endless pipeline of "content."
'But Devil May Cry is different. Devil May Cry is me stepping back into the mainstream, intentionally. I'm chasing that early 2000s, crowd-pleasing summer blockbuster energy. Big spectacle, big emotion, big fun. This isn't a carbon copy of what came before. It's a fireball aimed straight at the culture.'
Naturally, I wanted to follow up on Castlevania, as a lot has happened since the Castlevania animated series was released. What had Adi been up to?
'In 2022, I released Guardians of Justice on Netflix. The project was my 'Bootleg Universe' spoof mockbuster take on the Justice League. From the start, I made a deliberate choice to lean into camp and a B-movie aesthetic as a visual strategy. That texture wasn't accidental, it was my way of infusing surrealism into the piece. The B-movie vibe becomes the spoonful of sugar that lets the dark social commentary go down, reframing heavy subject matter through the lens of dark humor. At its core, Guardians is a social satire, and the intentionally 'low-budget' feel was just another brushstroke in my toolkit to prevent it from ever feeling self-important or tonally macabre.
'In 2023, I followed up with Captain Laserhawk for Netflix and Ubisoft. With Laserhawk, I built an entirely new IP from scratch, a retro-futuristic, cyberpunk remix of the Ubisoft multiverse. Think Captain N: The Game Masters…but good. It's a wild Elseworlds take that mashes up beloved characters in an unexpected, rebellious way. Laserhawk has since grown beyond just the series, it's evolving into a true universe.
'I also collaborated with Krafton to help develop a media strategy around PUBG, pushing the franchise beyond games and into broader entertainment spaces.
It took a lot of work to get 'Devil May Cry' off the ground.
'In addition, I developed a video game based on a major IP, a radical reinvention of that property, but the project unravelled when the game company was sold. Still, the experience was invaluable, and it lit a fire under me. Now, I've got three original video games in development!
'And beyond that, I've been building. I've developed three original projects, original worlds, original characters, original mythologies. I've been sharpening the blade. Devil May Cry is just the beginning of what will be a creative renaissance period for me.'
Many regard shows such as Castlevania and Devil May Cry as anime, despite not being animated in Japan, so I was curious as to what Adi's thoughts were on this
'To be clear, Devil May Cry is an animated series in the vein of X-Men more than it is 'anime.' With respect to the anime versus not anime debate. I'm not the moral arbiter of language use, but in my opinion, we need to invent more words.
'A macro problem here is that nomenclature within the entertainment industry has always been an issue. What is a producer exactly? What does a producer versus an executive producer do? Is an Assistant Director an assistant to the director (answer: no). Within the entertainment industry even our job titles are non-descriptive hand-me-downs from a bygone era and more often than not are negotiation points and not unilaterally indicative of any one role. This lack of clarity amongst our verbiage, then, spills over into confusion amongst the general population and marketplace. We're seeing another node of this nomenclature problem play out with the animation versus anime debate.
'With the aforementioned in mind, I see both sides of the anime versus not anime debate. But, practically speaking, we just need to invent more words. We need a word to describe adult animated content that comes out of France. Animators from emerging countries, like India, need a word to protect their work from the cultural biases against 'cartoons' from boomers with checkbooks who (like the Trix kids) believe cartoons are for kids. We need a word that clearly delineates adult animated sitcoms like Big Mouth from action adventure shows like Pacific Rim: Black. We need a word that describes more psychedelic experimental arthouse projects like Midnight Gospel.
'These new words we invent, in my humble opinion, should not be hamstrung down by the archaic construct of geographic borders, otherwise those words will be rendered anachronistic in short order. The global artist community is able to work together cross-culturally because of the internet, blurring the lines of geographic origination of every project.
'In the past, for decades we have had two seemingly polar ends of the spectrum: cartoons and anime. When westerners say they are making 'anime' I feel like a lot of times what they are actually trying to say is that they want to make something sophisticated than a cartoon. In addition, anime in and of itself is a very broad catch all term that could mean a plethora of different genres to an animation veteran. The point is that the animation industry is getting more complicated and animated projects more nuanced. Invent more words.
'So, we simply need to invent a litany of new words that are hyper-specific that describe to the audience very clearly what the end product is, so that the intended audience can then use that word to ask for more of that type of content. Personally, I don't like saying I'm making 'adult oriented animation projects.' The phrasing makes it sound like I got booted from Hollywood for making fan films and am now stuck in the Valley making pornographic content for bots.'
Shankar believes we need more 'hyper-specific' terms for modern animation.
What with anime adaptations all the rage in Hollywood, I wanted to know what Adi thought of those and why so many drop the ball.
'A lot of the film executives didn't get into this to make game and anime adaptations. I did. This is my first love, not my side hustle. In film school, games and anime aren't celebrated, they're dismissed. Most folks came in dreaming of Oscars, not adapting Naruto. They wanted to make prestige dramas, not orchestrate demon-slaying operas. So when they're handed these worlds, they treat them like foreign languages instead of mother tongues.
'The blame isn't just on Hollywood. Game companies fumble the ball just as often. Fear of risk, corporate silos, death by committee. Bureaucracy is the true villain here. It drains the soul out of what should be bold. What saves these adaptations is passion. And that's the lane I live in.
'I think legacy American IP is going to become less and less valuable over the next decade. Japan protects its creators. In the West, the moment something becomes popular, the system is designed to push the creator out and squeeze the IP across every platform until it burns out and becomes uncool.
'That strategy worked in the pre-internet era, when audiences didn't have visibility into how the sausage was made. But today? Young people have unprecedented access to information. They know who's making the stories they love, and they care why those stories are being told.
'What I see coming is a major shift. Western business practices that treat creativity like an exhaustible resource are going to be seen for what they are: exploitation. And we'll see a whole new generation of creators rise up, creators who refuse to be pushed out of their own work, creators who control their own destinies.'
Finishing up I wanted to know what plans Adi had for his future.
'I'm happy slaying demons in Devil May Cry and building out my original universes in Captain Laserhawk and Guardians of Justice. I don't need to gun juggle more franchises just to check a box. But…Street Fighter is a crown jewel. Its anime energy is already baked in. Duke Nukem I have a personal affinity for. Done with love and with craft, it could punch a hole straight through pop culture.'
Devil May Cry is currently available to watch on Netflix.
Follow me on X, Facebook and YouTube. I also manage Mecha Damashii and am currently featured in the Giant Robots exhibition currently touring Japan.