Arcane has come to an end — but the closing out of Vi, Jinx, Caitlyn, Jayce, and Viktor’s stories is more like a beginning than an ending.
According to Riot Games, Fortiche, and Netflix, the show’s finale didn’t arrive because it’s getting canceled; rather, it’s because it was simply the end of this particular story. But it’s certainly not the end to animated collaborations between Riot Games and Fortiche set in the League of Legends universe. And while there hasn’t been an official announcement of a new show just yet, there are plenty of new projects in the works.
According to Arcane showrunner and co-creator Christian Linke, Fortiche and Riot are bouncing around ideas about all kinds of other projects in the League of Legends world that could provide the basis for a new animated series.
“We have over 160 champions in our game. There’s tons of them where I’m like, I want to know their story,” Linke said in an interview with Polygon. “Now is the time, luckily, that we also can start thinking about that and dream big. So we have a slate of different projects we’re exploring, nothing’s in production yet, but we’re really building stories of all these different tonalities and they should be very different. They should not feel just like, OK, they should be their own style, their own tone. So that’s the next step for us.”
But for Linke, the appeal of a new show isn’t just getting to venture into a new corner of League lore, it’s also getting to explore an entirely different tone than that of Arcane.
“We haven’t done enough yet for the whimsical tone of League; Arcane is pretty dark,” Link said. “But there’s a lot of fun characters. There’s the Lulus, the Teemos, the Amumus, the Poppies, the Tristans. What do we do for those?
“And I think I would definitely want to take things [in a new show] into the extremes, like the different genres. What are we going to do in horror? What are we going to do in more abstract, more artistic things? That’s the real power of animation. You’re not grounded by what reality is. So we should take advantage of that.”
Of course, when exactly we’ll get to see Riot and Fortiche take jump into these new genre and settings remains a mystery. Arcane famously took nearly a decade to pull off, and while we likely won’t have to wait that long for a new show, it’s still likely to be at least a few years before Netflix returns to Runeterra.
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