‘Devil May Cry’ Creator Adi Shankar Introduces Netflix’s New Demon Hunter

This article was written for the April ’25 issue of Animation Magazine (No. 349).

Heavy on the fire and brimstone, Devil May Cry — Netflix’s smokin’ new anime series from maverick executive producer Adi Shankar and the talented wizards at Studio Mir — will be heating up the streaming realm this spring.

The eight-episode tale of revenge and deception is adapted from Capcom’s Devil May Cry video game franchise, which was created by Hideki Kamiya and first launched way back in 2001. The cult property’s notoriety has inflamed over the years via a number of sly sequels and spinoffs. This new animated horror project swirls around the life of a smart-ass demon hunter named Dante whose mother and twin brother were murdered by denizens of Hades. Our wisecracking crusader aims to spill some blood to avenge his family and protect our home world from harm.

“Hollywood is usually behind the curve, not ahead of it, and certain things are deemed niche even though they’re not,” Shankar tells Animation Magazine. “Devil May Cry? Super niche; at least that’s how it’s perceived to be by the establishment. Batman? Mainstream. Superman? Mainstream. Devil May Cry? Niche. To me, Devil May Cry is this beautiful thing that a few of us get and understand.”

Reimagining Hits

Shankar is widely known as the renegade producer and filmmaker behind his signature Bootleg Universe, in which he’s crafted short films that reimagine existing properties and characters, resulting in a cache of wildly original content. He’s also been a Hollywood producer on such films as The Grey and Dredd, a live-action Judge Dredd reboot starring Karl Urban, and he also has worked on Netflix’s exceptional Castlevania series and the streamer’s gaming-inspired jewel, Captain Laserhawk.

“On one level, I see this disconnect between the perception and the reality,” he explains. “In a lot of ways, Iron Man was considered niche. No one cared about Iron Man. But one thing from the right person can completely change the perception. My agenda here was to take something that I love and blow it up. I wanted to retain the feeling of Devil May Cry and not fundamentally change it, because I do that sometimes and that’s part of my repertoire. And not in a weird, sellout kind of way but in the way Christopher Nolan’s Batman [movies] did it for comic book films. It changed the perception of what these things could be.”

“I wanted the show to be really dark, very noir, a lot of shadows, like every ’90s anime that went too hard. But the story I came up with for Season 1 didn’t really fit that vibe, so I had to table that for later.”

— Show creator/producer Adi Shankar

Devil May Cry has legions of loyal fans, and this long-gestating anime enterprise is being meticulously massaged by Shankar and his writing partner, Alex Larsen, to extract the essence of the digital sensation (down to the choice of Limp Bizkit’s “Rollin’” as its theme song).

“I go into these situations knowing I’ve got X amount of leverage now, and I can cash in those chips to get things made,” he says. “This would be another animation series, and I’d kind of blow it up. My issue with it is that I didn’t feel like there was enough Devil May Cry-style media, and it wasn’t coming out often enough for me. As a fan, my goal was to grow the franchise to the point where we have a lot more of it, without diluting it into generic nonsense. I like this and I’m going to make it, and by making it, there’ll be more of it. Then if I do a good enough job, there’ll keep being more of it.”

That’s certainly a calculation that makes perfect sense, but video game adaptations can be tricky beasts. Shankar and Larsen were careful to inject the writing with their own distinct edge, while retaining the core flavor of Devil May Cry and respecting its legacy and violent lore.

“I wanted to preserve the characters this time,” he says. “I don’t always do that. This time, there was no need to change them. It was just an exercise in exploring them and getting to know the layers of them in a dramatic circumstance. When I develop material, I’m seeing the whole thing, then slicing it into little pieces and working with writers to sculpt each scene. Alex and I did at least 20 drafts of Season 1. However long you think you should stay in the outline space, it’s three times as long. If it’s not fluid in the outline, then the problems are going to pop up in the script. I put it down and let the characters exist within me and see what they want to tell me. I came back four or five months later, and I told Alex, ‘Hey dude, there are actually these relationships happening that are not on the page.’ So you’re adding another layer of nuance.

“Part of the reason I insisted on spending so much time on Devil May Cry was a rejection of the content factory of entertainment that I felt was emerging and diminishing the artists. The way you fight back is you pour human time into it. When Netflix first read it, they were blown away.”

South Korea-based Studio Mir (X-Men ’97, Voltron: Legendary Defender) delivers the illuminating animation for Devil May Cry, and it’s some of its most ambitious work to date. The studio has provided a rich tapestry of brilliant character designs and atmospheric backgrounds for Dante’s dangerous world that should satisfy even the most discriminating of viewers.

“They completely crushed it on every level,” Shankar says. “I wanted the show to be really dark, very noir, a lot of shadows, like every ’90s anime that went too hard. But the story I came up with for Season 1 didn’t really fit that vibe, because I was wanting to tell a story that was very inspired by early-2000s Hollywood blockbusters, before everything started getting preachy and watered-down. Like Mission: Impossible 2, John Woo movies, Replacement Killers, Equilibrium. The overall mood and vibe that I had in my mind was in conflict with the type of story I wanted to tell, so I had to table that for later.”

Unusual Visuals

“What I’m trying to bring back in my work is — there was this whole genre of films from the ’90s and 2000s and late ’80s where the imagination was at ‘100,’ the budget was at a ‘two’ and the ingenuity was at a ‘50.’ And they made magic happen. Then all of a sudden computers get better, CGI gets better, and you can create anything with green screen. Now you look at movies, and you can create anything, but everything looks the same.”

Compromising his artistic vision has never been Shankar’s approach, but here a bit of discretion became the better part of valor for Devil May Cry’s critical debut season.

“So I ended up going with a brighter tone and used two references for my color palette, one of them was the Japanese alternate title sequence for X-Men: The Animated Series and the other one was Marvel vs. Capcom. There’s color theory baked into everything, and it’s not some new varnish that was added. It’s really just an amplification of what’s already there in the game.”

Devil May Cry premieres on Netflix on April 3.