Amazon announces weird-ass cartoon anthology series set inside existing video games

The video game adaptation renaissance has been going along steadily for long enough at this point that not even a flop like Borderlands—which both feels, and literally is, the product of a world from before the release of either crowd-pleasers like The Super Mario Bros. Movie, or critical darlings like The Last Of Us—is likely to slow it down. Which means that efforts to adapt video games to TV or film now have enough of a runway to get a little strange. Case in point: The reveal today that Prime Video is working with Deadpool director and Love, Death & Robots creator Tim Miller on an animated anthology series titled Secret Level, not based on a single game, but set in the worlds of multiple popular titles.

This is, to put none too fine a point on it, weird. Game companies tend to be aggressively protective of their intellectual property, especially in this day and age—to the point that Naughty Dog creative director Neil Druckmann is an incredibly active force in the creation of the Last Of Us show, overseeing its various tinkerings with oh-so-precious canon. The idea of handing off the brand to outsiders to craft a story set inside your video game universe, which will then sit alongside other games in a larger anthology title, just sounds incredibly strange to our ears. It doesn’t help that the titles reportedly being targeted are decidedly eclectic: Sony’s library of PlayStation titles makes a certain sense, as well as Amazon’s own New World online title. But Deadline also reports that Derek Yu’s Spelunky, a self-published, self-owned indie title, is supposedly in the mix. (It’s also easily the one of these we’re most interested in seeing, since Spelunky‘s beautifully cartoonish style is a great potential fit for an animated short.)

Miller himself is a bit of an odd figure himself, though: Although his most successful project by most metrics was 2016’s Deadpool, he didn’t end up coming back for any of the sequels, and the franchise has now been marked indelibly with star Ryan Reynolds’ brand. His Terminator movie, Dark Fate, slumped into theaters in 2019. But his recent sci-fi anthology series Love, Death & Robots has garnered critical acclaim, suggesting that short-form might be his more comfortable medium. It’ll be interesting, if nothing else, to see what he does here; Secret Level will reportedly get a more official roll out at Gamescom later this month.