LIKE A DRAGON
Double Dragon
Can Like A Dragon: Yakuza translate into another videogame-to-TV hit for Amazon?
Following the success of Fallout,Amazon has cranked up its interest in videogame adaptations, with intriguing anthology Secret Level coming this December. Before that, however, comes Like A Dragon: Yakuza, a TV series whose name amalgamates the two monikers used by its source material.
While there already exists a 2007 film adaptation, directed by Takashi Miike, this time the story of legendary yakuza Kazuma Kiryu is told in an episodic series, which better reflects the chapter-based structure of the games. And if there are any concerns over this distinctively Japanese series as an American co-production, executive producer Erik Barmack assures us this is something they wanted to get right.
“We were having a lot of conversations with Sega around making sure that it was going to be authentic, that it was going to be done in Japanese, that we were going to involve the right talent, and that, of course, we had the right broadcaster and distribution partner,” he explains. “The shooting itself was reasonably long, because the scope of the show itself is quite big. All of that led to a process that took a couple of years, mostly because we’re dealing with a complex world that we wanted to treat authentically.”