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Matt Dinniman knows you want an animated Dungeon Crawler Carl show.

The thing is, it's been largely assumed that the in-development series, based on Dinniman's LitRPG series of the same name, will be a live-action project. Recently, at Emerald City Comic Con 2026, Dinniman confirmed as much, saying that "the live-action Dungeon Crawler Carl series is still alive and well." That said, Dinniman is very much in touch with the fact that his fans want to see the titular action hero and his talking cat sidekick Princess Donut in the glorious cartoon medium.

Some context here - Dinniman was taking part in ECCC's Lit RPG OMG panel, hosted by yours truly when he made the statement that DCC TV was definitely happening in live-action. That said, though, its's still very much in a development stage.

"We haven't yet gotten to the point," Dinniman explained, "Where someone has said, 'Yes, lets start filming next week.' I've had multiple friends go through this process, and everything's been, 'Yes, yes, yes, this is amazing!' And they get right to the finish line, and then BAM! It gets cancelled. We want to keep that in mind."

It's kind of a downer to keep in mind, but we suppose it's nice you're managing our expectations, Matt. But anyway, let's get back to this whole animation vs. live-action thing.

"To answer the question," Dinnaman began, "We talked about it. I think if you poll a lot of the hardcore, original fans of Dungeon Crawler Carl and said, 'Would you rather have live action or animated?', most people would say 'animated.' But if you poll the normies on the street [I'm booing too, reader], you'll get 80%+ saying they want live action."

I know, I'm just a smidge disappointed too. But as Carl's literary daddy reminds us, "Don't knock it till you see it."

"Hopefully," the author told his fans, "We'll have some news one way or the other in the next few weeks. Because we've reached, contractually, some deadlines, some decisions that need to be made on certain things. [...] It's to the point where people that are holding the purses are the ones making the decisions, as opposed to the creative team. They're the people you really need to convince in the end, and then you need to convince them to fuck off and let the creative people do what they want."

Best of luck with that last part, Matt. 

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