Arcane is just the beginning of Riot and Fortiche’s plans for League of Legends shows
Arcane has come to an end – but the end of the stories of Vi, Jinx, Caitlyn, Jayce and Viktor is more of a beginning than an end.
According to Riot Games, Fortiche and Netflix, the show’s finale has not arrived as it is being cancelled; rather, it’s because it was simply the end of this particular story. But this is certainly not the end of the 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 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 form the basis for a new animated series.
“We have more than 160 champions in our game. There are many that I like, I want to know their story,” Linke said in an interview with Polygon. “Fortunately, now is the time when we can also think about that and dream big. So we have a whole bunch of different projects that we’re exploring, nothing’s in production yet, but we’re really building stories with all these different tonalities and they should be very different. They shouldn’t feel like, okay, they have to have their own style, their own tone. So that is the next step for us.”
But for Linke, the appeal of a new show isn’t just about breaking new ground Competition lore, it’s also going to explore a very different tone than that of Arcane.
“We haven’t done enough yet for the erratic tone of Competition; Arcane is pretty dark,” Link said. “But there are a lot of nice characters. There are the Lulus, the Teemos, the Amumus, the Poppies, the Tristans. What do we do for that?
“And I think I would definitely want to take things (in a new show) to the extremes, like the different genres. What are we going to do out of fear? What are we going to do in more abstract, more artistic things? That’s the real power of animation. You are not grounded in what reality is. So we have to take advantage of that.”
Of course, when exactly we’ll see Riot and Fortiche jump into this new genre and settings remains a mystery. Arcane It took almost a decade for Netflix to launch, and while we probably won’t have to wait that long for a new show, it will likely be at least a few more years before Netflix returns to Runeterra.