A few years ago, the Wall Street Journal reported that Nintendo and Netflix were working on a live-action TV series based on The Legend of Zelda. Nothing came of this and it was dismissed as rumors but according to comedian Adam Conover, it was real and canceled due to the original leak.
Conover stated this during The Serf Times podcast and also stated that a Star Fox claymation project inspired by Wes Anderson’s Fantastic Mr. Fox movie adaptation was also planned, this time in partnership with CollegeHumor.
“I worked at CollegeHumor and we had a secret project where we were going to make a claymation version of StarFox with Nintendo. 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 program to adapt these things.”