Life is Strange has been floating around as a potential TV show for a few years now, but on Friday it was officially confirmed that Amazon Prime was creating the series, with The End of the F***ing World creator Charlie Covell running the show. However, not involved are any of the people responsible for creating the game in the first place. Christian Divine, the writer of the original series, took to X to point out that the developers from Don’t Nod apparently have no role.
Rumors of a Life is Strange TV adaptation go back as far as 2016, but it wasn’t until last week that the light went green. Variety reported that Amazon MGM has picked up the series based on the magical adventures of Max Caulfield, a student who can rewind time, with executive producers coming from Square Enix, Story Kitchen and LuckyChap, and Amazon producing. Story Kitchen is the production company headed by Dmitri M. Johnson and Mike Goldberg, which is also behind the forthcoming Tomb Raider show for Amazon. (Johnson previously helmed dj2 Entertainment, which was also shopping Life is Strange, and he produces the Sonic movies.) Lucky Chap was behind Saltburn, Barbie and this year’s Wuthering Heights. Along with Charlie Covell (they were also responsible for creating the incredible Netflix series Kaos), it looks like a stellar team to be creating the program. But it also lacks any names from developer Don’t Nod, which has attracted the ire of Divine.
The only people not involved are the creators.
— Christian Divine (@Chris_divine) September 5, 2025
“The only people not involved are the creators,” Divine pointedly posted on X, quoting the Amazon MGM Studios announcement. Divine, who also had a role on Deus Ex, has only made one other comment on the subject. Responding to comedian Jonathan Callan, he sardonically dropped a Chinatown gif with the phrase, “Forget it Jake, it’s Chinatown.”
I can imagine how much it must suck for the creators and writers of the narrative-led game to see its reincarnation created without them. It must be galling. It’s also often the case that adaptations can need to take such big steps away from source material to work—people constantly underestimate the extreme challenge of creating a satisfying story from games that allows a great deal of player choice—that it can be a brutal process for creators, who can even end up hindering things by not wanting to kill their darlings. (There’s a very good reason people like Alan Moore refuse to have anything to do with adaptations of their work, and refuse to ever watch them.) Either way, it’ll be a controversial element, but an easy scapegoat for die-hard fans who wish to blame someone for every aspect of the show they don’t enjoy.