There are bad video game to movie/TV adaptations, then there’s the very notion of adapting Persona into a live-action series. According to a report from Variety, a live-action Persona series is now in the works at Netflix, with 21 Laps and Story Kitchen set to produce the show.
Christopher Monfette will serve as the showrunner and lead writer, while Toru Nakahara from Sega will serve as one of the show’s executive producers. Monfette has previously worked on projects like 12 Monkeys, Star Trek: Picard, and is set to work on VisionQuest on Disney+. On the flip side, Story Kitchen is currently working on the live-action adaptations of Tomb Raider and Life Is Strange, so at least that team has some experience with video games as a source material.
Still, I’d be lying if I said I was excited about this. Personally, I’m already not a fan of the Persona anime adaptations, believing them to be condensed and truncated versions of the games’ stories, and vastly inferior to the experience you get from playing the game itself. Turning it into a live-action series sounds even more like a recipe for trouble, and I’m simply not convinced Netflix would be able to do a half-decent job of getting such a Japanese-centric series to translate well into an adaptation for western audiences.
But what do I know, right? Plenty of weird live-action adaptations have done well for themselves so far. Avatar: The Last Airbender seems to be doing well for itself, even if I remain unconvinced as that show gets its second season. And for some weird, inexplicable reason, people seem to love the live-action One Piece show on Netflix too, which is just wild to me. So who knows? Maybe Persona will end up being a hit. Maybe I’ll even love it! …Nah.
On the video games side of things, Persona 4 Revival has a confirmed release date and it’ll be made available in February 2027. Persona 6 has also been announced, though we don’t know too much about that, apart from the fact that it’ll be exploring occult and paranormal themes.
