When it was announced that Peacock had officially given Dungeon Crawler Carl a straight-to-series order back in June, it was news that had fans yelling “new achievement!” and for good reason. Matt Dinniman’s LitRPG book series has absolutely exploded becoming the biggest sci-fi franchise of the year and one of the biggest of the decade to date, having gone from a self-published book to a full-on empire with audiobooks, webcomics, graphic novels, games, more books on the horizon and even more things to come. Of course, after the announcement of the series, fans had some initial concerns, but those were handled pretty quickly as well with not only the announcement that Jeff Hays will be the voice of Princess Donut for the series, but Dinniman’s revelation that the series chose someone who knows, understands, and is a fan of the series to handle the adaptation.
Videos by ComicBook.com
However, despite these very positive developments that certainly addressed my own biggest concerns about the Dungeon Crawler Carl television series, there’s another problem that has been gnawing away at my excitement. Peacock is the streamer developing the Dungeon Crawler Carl adaptation and that raises some concerns. While Peacock has certainly come a long way since its debut in 2020, the platform hasn’t exactly had the best track record with series longevity — and given everything that is going to be required to make Dungeon Crawler Carl, I’m worried the series may have a challenging future ahead of it before it even makes it to screen.
Peacock Doesn’t Have the Best Track Record With Expensive Productions
The biggest reason for my concerns when it comes to Peacock and Dungeon Crawler Carl frankly comes down to money. Peacock doesn’t necessarily have a great track record when it comes to expensive production. The most recent example of this that jumps out for me is Ted. The prequel series to Seth MacFarlane’s Ted movies about the foul-mouthed, sentient teddy bear of the same name got two seasons on Peacock but was cancelled in March of this year. MacFarlane himself confirmed that there were no plans for a third season and cited cost as the reason. Ted required a lot of CGI and visual effects, both of which made the series very expensive to produce. It was enough for Peacock to pull the plug.
And it’s not the first time that Peacock has cancelled series because of cost. One of the earlier original series on the platform, Brave New World, also was cancelled — in this case after just one season — largely due to cost. The series was a high concept, big budget sci-fi adaptation that cost Peacock a lot of money to produce. While part of the issue for Brave New World also came down to the fact that there was some low viewership (the series was one of the first on the brand-new platform, after all), the budget was a major consideration. With a lack of mainstream subscriber interest combined with the monetary concerns, the show didn’t stand a chance.
Dungeon Crawler Carl May Be Popular, But It’s Still Niche
Both of those cancellations as well as others, namely another expensive-to-produce adaptation, Vampire Academy, have me concerned that Dungeon Crawler Carl might be bound for the same fate. Like TED, Dungeon Crawler Carl is going to be CGI and visual effects heavy. After all, this is a series where many of the characters are not human; Princess Donut is a sapient show cat who ends up acquiring a velociraptor named Mongo as her pet and mighty steed. There’s also a literal goat named Prepotente who is the GOAT and I’m only scratching the surface here. Dungeon Crawler Carl is going to be very expensive and the payoff in terms of viewership might not be what Peacock is hoping for. Yes, Dungeon Crawler Carl is popular but it is popular across some very specific niches of fans. That doesn’t necessarily translate to widespread, mainstream appeal. If the series doesn’t take off right away with the same sort of popularity the books have, Peacock might not want to give it the time to grow its audience because of the cost.
Of course, things could still go well for the series. We’ve seen it happen for other relatively niche books before. Game of Thrones wasn’t necessarily a massively popular “mainstream” book series (though it was beloved by fantasy fans) and it ended up being a hugely popular television series that became its own pop cultural moment. It could happen for Dungeon Crawler Carl, too. It also helps that the book series is ongoing and has a lot of popularity on social media — BookTok and Bookstagram are both powerhouses when it comes to pushing things into cultural popularity. And if the series gets another key casting right with Carl himself, the series could very well explode. But for now, my excitement is tempered with concerns that while there is easily 10 seasons of material to work with, the dungeon might get the better of fans.
