Nintendo reportedly canned live-action Zelda series after Netflix leaked plans

A Netflix deal to make a live-action The Legend of Zelda TV series was scrapped by Nintendo after word of the project was leaked back in 2015.

That's according to US comedian Adam Conover, who was working on a similar Nintendo project at the time.

Speaking last night on The Serf Times podcast, as dug by up supererogatory , Conover says he was in talks with Nintendo to make a Star Fox claymation project inspired by Wes Anderson's Fantastic Mr. Fox movie adaptation.

But when The Wall Street Journal leaked word of the Zelda series, Nintendo got cold feet on the project - and all other plans to adapt its franchises.

"I worked at CollegeHumour and we had a secret project where we were going to make a claymation version of StarFox with Nintendo," Conover said. "I know this because Shigeru Miyamoto came to our office, and I remember that because I asked my boss if I could be in the office that day - 'cos it was the weekend - because I just wanted to watch Shigeru Miyamoto walk by. He told me no and I'm still mad at him...

"Then, a month later, suddenly there were reports Netflix wasn't going to do its Legend of Zelda anymore. I was like 'what happened?' And then I heard from my boss we weren't doing our Star Fox anymore. I was like 'what happened?'. He was like, 'someone at Netflix leaked the Legend of Zelda thing, they weren't supposed to talk about it, Nintendo freaked out... and they pulled the plug on everything, the entire programme to adapt these things."

Back in 2015, the WSJ said it had a source "familiar" with the Netflix project who described the series as "Game of Thrones for a family audience".

Two weeks after the report surfaced, the late Nintendo president Satoru Iwata was asked about the leak in an interview, to which he replied that the article was incorrect (which by that point, it probably was).

What could have been?