Dungeon Crawler Carl is headed to Peacock for a series

Peacock has picked up the adaptation for Matt Dinniman's blockbuster LitRPG series Dungeon Crawler Carl, in which Coast Guard veteran Carl and his ex-girlfriend's show cat, Princess Donut are forced to compete in the brutal reality series after Earth is transformed into a series of horrifying and violent levels for the entertainment of the galactic populace.

The series has a basic, Douglas Adams-like conceit: When Carl's ex-girlfriend's prize show cat escapes from his apartment, he goes out in his boxer shorts to try and get her back inside, when everything smashes down to the ground: buildings, trees, cars, everything. Anyone who was inside has been killed, and anyone who was outside are drawn to a series of doors that have opened up into the ground.

It's then that they're informed of what's happening: Earth has been targeted for destruction and strip mining by a larger galactic civilization, and those survivors are going to compete in a fairly horrific competition called Dungeon Crawler World, a galactic reality show where the unwitting contestants have to fight their way through a series of increasingly-difficult levels. In the first novel, Carl and Donut hack their way through the level, gaining skill points and gear and slowly make names for themselves as they contend with the game AI's oversight of the competition, preen for the galactic audience that becomes their fanbase, and as they battle groups of monsters, dungeon bosses, and the occasional fellow crawlers in order to descend further into the game and hopefully someday escape.

The series is comprised of seven novels: Dungeon Crawler Carl, Carl's Doomsday Scenario, The Dungeon Anarchist's Cookbook, The Gate of the Feral Gods, The Butcher's Masquerade, The Eye of the Bedlam Bride, and This Inevitable Ruin. An eighth installment, A Parade of Horribles, arrives in stores on May 12th. Dinniman has said that he's planning on around ten installments in all.

I picked up and blew through the first book earlier this year, and really enjoyed it. It's not what I'd put on the shelf of "genre classic" – it's in the broad crowd pleaser category that I'd stick books like Ernest Cline's Ready Player One (which feels very much like a forerunner to this series) and Andy Weir's The Martian and Project Hail Mary, in that they're irreverent and fun to read and feed into an audience's love of pop culture and role playing games. But where it's light and fun, it also does come with a more serious edge, especially when as Carl contemplates the horror that he and Donut have been dropped into.

Dinniman has been writing for the better part of two decades, publishing a handful of novels and short stories over the years, according to a profile in The New York Times, which noted that he held a variety of jobs before turning to graphic design and art — particularly artwork featuring cats. He found his work in demand, particularly on the cat show circuit, and he ended up quitting his day job to focus on that, eventually earning upwards of six figures.

It was in 2019 that he began writing Dungeon Crawler Carl, initially serializing it on the web fiction platform Royal Road. When the COVID-19 pandemic arrived in early 2020 and the in-person shows that supported his livelihood closed down, so he shifted his focus to his fiction, self-publishing the first installment 0n Amazon, through Patreon, and eventually, through Audible.

In Times profile, publishers began to inquire about the series before too long: he had sold “several hundred thousand copies on his own” and he was making more money than publishers were offering.” But Ace made an enticing offer: they offered to only publish the books as hardcovers and trade paperbacks, rather than the ebooks or audiobooks (of which he’s sold more than 3 million copies), and in August, they started rolling out the new editions, which came with a bonus, serialized novella. “The partnership has been lucrative for Ace which… has sold more than a million hardcover copies.”

With a huge publishing deal, it’s little wonder that Hollywood has been interested. Shortly before Ace launched its editions in the summer of 2024, Universal International Studios and Seth MacFarlane’s Fuzzy Door Productions began developing a potential adaptation of the series.

Like any such deal, these things take time, but the wait seems to be working nicely in Dinniman's favor: a quick peek at Google Trends shows that searches for the book has grown considerably since they were re-released in August 2024. Notably, the books didn't instantly land on The New York Times Bestseller list: Dungeon Crawler Carl only showed up on the list earlier this year, but it's remained on the list for 12 weeks (it's currently at #7 on the NYT's Combined Print & E-Book Fiction list), which says to me that there's a lot of sustained word of mouth from readers and booksellers that are propelling it and his other novels along.

Dinniman spoke with Variety back in February around the time that his non-Dungeon Crawler Carl novel, Operation Bounce House was hitting stores, and provided an update on the series: we’re at the point where Chris Yost, who’s writing the show, has written a few episodes”

“And I don’t think it’s public yet, the streaming service that has picked it up, but we’re getting pretty close to the point where a decision needs to be made, like contracts needs to be made, whether or not they’re going to go ahead and go with. And that whole process involves the scripts, involves CGI testing, and budgetary stuff, and lots of stuff that’s above my pay grade.”

That interview provided some other interesting behind-the-scenes details about the project's route to the small screen: an inquiry arrived in 2023 asking about the rights, prompting Dinniman to consult with a lawyer, who put him in touch with agents for the literary and TV rights at WME, who then began pitching the series in earnest. Dinniman noted that his main criteria were to "only work with someone who’s read it and enjoyed it and doesn’t want to just snatch up," ultimately landing with Fuzzy Door Productions.

Now, we know where that project landed: Peacock, which had previously hosted MacFarlane's series Ted, a prequel series to his two films that recently came to an end after two seasons.

MacFarlane feels like a good choice for this sort of project: Dungeon Crawler Carl is very funny book, one that's also steeped in topical pop culture, which falls right in line with shows like Family Guy, Ted, and The Orville, and it feels like it could sit alongside films like Ready Player One or Free Guy.

There's still a good distance left to cross before this could begin streaming. Development means a lot of trying out ideas with scripts and design, kicking the tires to see if what they've come up with will work as a series. Should that play out as planned and Peacock orders the show to a series, we'll then see them run the gauntlet that is production.

Hopefully, they'll be able to translate what's appealed to such a big audience for television, and if they do it right, it should be quite the ride.