Hello Crawlers: The “Dungeon Crawler Carl” TV series announced in August 2024 is alive and well at NBCUniversal and Seth MacFarlane’s Fuzzy Door Productions, according to author Matt Dinniman, who has already read the first few scripts for the project.
“Right now, we’re at the point where Chris Yost, who’s writing the show, has written a few episodes,” Dinniman told Variety in an interview Friday. “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.”
Dinniman continued: “So the project, as of this moment, is still very much alive. We’re still very much moving forward. Things are happening literally daily. But I’ve also had friends who’ve gone through this process and everything hits a brick wall. And I’ve seen it happen so many times, I’m just kind of in a, ‘Well, I’ll believe it when I see it’ state. But this is where we’re headed right now, and I’m cautiously optimistic we’ll get there.”
Back in 2023, Dinniman says someone reached out to him asking if the movie and TV rights were available. He spoke with an entertainment attorney who had read “Carl” and was already a fan, and the lawyer advised him that this was a legitimate offer — “but it’s not the one we went with,” Dinniman said.
“He said, you need an agent. And through him, I found both my literary agent, and then my film and TV rights agents at WME. And they created a pitch and they approached multiple studios, and we had multiple people looking at it.”
Dinniman says his “specific criteria” for the project was he’d “only work with someone who’s read it and enjoyed it and doesn’t want to just snatch up.” And he found that in NBCUniversal subsequently Seth MacFarlane’s Fuzzy Door, which has an overall deal with the studio.
Since the series was announced, “Carl” fans have been debating whether the live-action format is the right move here. Dinniman understands the concern, but he makes the case for why he’s willing to give it a shot over animation (though MacFarlane is certainly no stranger to an animated show).
“It’s kind of funny. A lot of the more hardcore nerdy fans — I mean, like I am — will say, we want it animated. And then I think actually the majority of people who aren’t into animation are going to say, we want a live action,” Dinniman said. “If you actually poll people out on the street, it’s going to be a pretty high number of live action. But that’s really high risk, high reward, because we’re not going to do it if it’s gonna look like absolute shit. And they will do CGI testing on Princess Donut and stuff like that. And that’s all I can say, I think. It’s all gonna hinge on what it looks like. But Fuzzy Door, specifically, if you watch ‘Ted’ or ‘The Orville, ‘you’ll see that they know what they’re doing when it comes to this. So I would say, don’t knock it till you try it.”
Dinniman believes the potential show, which still needs to be ordered to series at a streamer or platform, is in good hands, but also says he has not revealed the planned ending of the final “Carl” book to that producing team — or to anyone else. So if, God forbid, something happens to him before he finishes the series…
“Nope. That is your problem,” Dinniman said, adding: “Maybe you could get Brandon Sanderson to write it?”
Dinniman says his latest release, “Operation Bounce House,” is an idea that’s been with him since high school, well before he conceived “Carl” around 2007. He then wrote the “vast majority” of “Bounce House” at the end of 2024 with current events being “what pretty much shaped the story it became.”
Read more from Variety‘s interview with Dinniman below, including spoilers breaking down the ending of his newly released book, “Operation Bounce House,” and teases for the upcoming eighth book in the “Dungeon Crawler Carl” series, “Parade of Horribles,” set to release May 12.
“Dungeon Crawler Carl” has been dealing with the topic of genocide from the very beginning. But “Operation Bounce House” also delves into genocide. Was that because there was a specific story that you wanted to tell in “Carl” that you couldn’t there, or a different message you feel like you’re sending with “Operation Bounce House”?
I think “Operation Bounce House” gets closer to today than “Carl.” “Carl” is kind of esoteric in how we deal with like othering and people who don’t view people as the same as them. But it’s also aliens versus humans, whereas this is humans versus humans. In “Operation Bounce House,” it’s very specifically related to our online behavior; how we have this computer between us, and that’s all we know about the other people. When we have this great filter that’s the government saying, “This is who they are. This is what they’ve done. This is what they’re doing to you. So this is what we should do to them.” And yes, they are similar stories, but “Operation Bounce House” is definitely a little more honest and relevant to things that are happening in the world today.
How did you reach the point in “Operation Bounce House” where they give up on showing the people of Earth the horrible things that are happening on New Sonora, and instead perform their show and stream the documentary about their everyday lives? Were there any specific moments in 2024 that inspired that, and what it actually takes for people to care about what’s happening to others?
When I started writing and I was like, what can they do? Do we do just another regular, big fight and then they beat them at the end? No, what happens is, they decide that instead of showing them all the horrible things they’ve done — because what happens is people see something horrible, and then they look away. But when they see something that they can relate with like, humans just being humans, then they finally relate. And it ends up it’s the pig’s and the chickens’ Instagram account that pretty much helps them along the way.
And there wasn’t one specific event that happened. It’s been one thing after another; it’s happening everywhere you look. And I didn’t want it to be laser focused on one specific event anyway. But everywhere you look, it’s people who are clustered in their — I don’t want to say the word tribes, but that’s what I say in the book. It seems like this Group A doesn’t like Group B, and because of that, even though A is way stronger than Group B, they’re beating them down. And there’s echo chambers that are just reinforcing that and reinforcing that. But I’ve found strongly that when you meet someone face to face, you hang out with them, and you become friends with them, your world view changes greatly.
And I don’t want to make any definitive conclusions based on that, but I’ve found people who live in settings where they have more friendly interaction with people who are different than themselves, they tend to be significantly more open minded about other people. The problem is, when you start grouping so many people together and it’s like an urban setting, then some people start to feel isolated again. So I don’t know what the solution is. I think Roger and his fellow AIs in the book had their solution, and I don’t think that’s the solution myself.
Speaking of Roger Roger and the AI in “Operation Bounce House,” it’s very different than the AI we’ve gotten to know over a long time and several books in “Dungeon Crawler Carl.” What are the different things you are trying to say about AI in these stories?
So first off, the AI in “Carl” is a different sort of thing. It’s not the same sort of AI that’s affecting our lives today. That’s going to be abundantly clear in Book 8, it’s a completely different thing. But that was one of the reasons why I wanted to write “Operation Bounce House,” because “Carl” started people asking me constantly, well, what’s your opinion on AI? And I think it’s pretty abundantly clear with my book “Kaiju: Battlefield Surgeon,” which I wrote in 2018, that was about an artist who lost his job because of AI art. And that was before that really started to happen.
And then Roger Roger, the generative AI has become more intelligent. And then they started working autonomously. And in the story of New Sonora, we make it so digital masking or filters or pretending to be someone else becomes illegal. And that’s impossible, obviously, with the way the internet currently works. So they have to tear the whole internet down and rebuild it, basically, to stop that from happening. And I don’t see us tearing down the internet to fix it, but I see this becoming a very, very huge issue. Forget the environmental stuff, which is important as well; forget the fact that AI is trained using illicitly gained materials; forget that for a moment and just focus on what’s actually going to happen. Today, a lot of people talk about how AI art sucks, it looks stupid, it’s fake. But that’s not going to keep happening. And that’s not true, first off. AI art is good and that’s gonna be a problem because it’s getting better.
Mark Lawrence, who is an author, he has a blog that he wrote in August of 2025, not very long ago. And you can look at it right now, there’s eight short stories up there. Four of them are written by famous authors, four of them are written by AI, and they’re all mixed up. You don’t know who’s who, and you’re supposed to vote and guess. And if you look at the results, they’re absolutely terrifying. These are really short stories, like 100-word stories, but that’s where AI is going. So the question has to change to, assuming AI is just as good or better than humans at some things, then should we still be afraid of it? And I think the answer is yes.
First off, the whole purpose of art is to celebrate another human’s vision. The whole purpose of looking at a painting is to see through someone else’s eyes for a moment. And when you remove the human element, what’s the point? I mean, corporations aren’t gonna give a shit because they want a picture of a chair on their website, and they don’t want to pay someone $50 to draw a picture of a chair, so they’re just gonna go to AI. So this argument is never gonna solve anything, but that’s my argument. We are slowly, slowly, slowly squeezing the humanity out of the one thing that humanity shines best at, and that is our creative, our artwork. And because of that, we are slowly, slowly, slowly going to where the dark vision I envision in “Operation Bounce House,” where we are cruel to each other. And that’s the event horizon I see we’re about to step into with AI. What can we do about it? I have no fucking clue. But that’s where we’re headed, I think.
You mentioned Book 8, “Parade of Horribles.” It looks like the length of this one is going to be about 700 pages. That would be the shortest book since Book 5, “Butcher’s Masquerade.”
So “Butcher’s Masquerade,” I think, is 220,000 words. And this one is right on 200,000 words. It’s longer than “Gate of the Feral Gods,” or it’s about the same length, and it’s way shorter than “This Inevitable Ruin,” and shorter than “Eye of the Bedlam Bride.”
What should we make of that?
Well, first, it’s a non-Scolapendra floor. So there’s less — I don’t want to say less story tickering, because something very major happens at the end of it. But it was always going to be a little bit shorter, I think. In addition, Penguin Random House deliberately told me, we want this to be shorter. And I was like, that’s going to be fine — but the next one is going to be really long.
So what we’re going to do, I think, is — this isn’t set in stone — but I think 9 is the last book, but it’ll be split into two books. So there’s still going to be 10 books total, but I anticipate the last one is going to be pretty wordy. I’m a pretty wordy dude.
The first draft [of “Parade of Horribles”] was 235,000 words, which puts it slightly longer than “Butcher’s Masquerade,” but the final version I turned in was like 195,000 and it grew to be about 200,000. That’s still really long! The average book is 70,000 words.
I’d love to know how your writing process has changed since the very beginning. The way you are writing “Carl” now vs. the way you were writing and distributing “Carl” before, knowing that in May, the number of eyes that will be on “Parade of Horribles” is so much higher.
Well, it’s pretty insane. By the time I was done with Book 3, “The Dungeon Anarchist’s Cookbook,” I had maybe 500 people, 1,000 people reading it. And now, I will literally have over a million people read “Dungeon Crawler Carl” Book 8. And that’s a lot of pressure. You see other authors who may not finish their books, without naming names, and I get it. I do get it.
Because what happens is, you go to these events and these signings, and people come up to you and they say, “This book has changed my life. This book, I can’t stop thinking about it, it’s everything to me.” I have people tell me that they’ve been suicidal, and they’re putting off killing themselves because they’re waiting for my book. And that’s a lot of pressure — that’s weight on my own mental health. And I can understand other authors just crushing under that weight. And for me personally, I can’t wait to sit down and write. I can’t wait to get these words out. So it affects me greatly, but it doesn’t affect my output, if that makes sense. But I worry so much about what other people think, to a certain extent, but it doesn’t stop me from doing stupid shit when I’m writing. Like, the stupidest thing you’d ever think of ends up happening at the end of Book 8, I can’t wait for people to read it.
But the process is so different. I was doing everything myself, from the editing, or hiring editors and doing a lot of it just myself. And now with Book 8, I still self-publish “Dungeon Crawler Carl” and Penguin Random House licenses the right to publish the physical copies. But it is going through their editorial process now. So I have someone that I don’t know, I haven’t talked to face to face, being the one that’s sending me edits on commas and all that stuff. And that’s very different. There’s the marketing people that are setting up things like this, sending me on tour. And a lot of these people are people I’ve not necessarily met. There’s this whole engine. I was just at the Penguin Random House building, and it’s like this huge building with hundreds and hundreds, if not thousands, of people working there, and all of that to create all the books that they publish. Whereas in self publishing you’re so close to it, and you’re sitting there and you see the stats/ I know up to the minute how many books are being sold. And in this, you don’t get those sort of stats.
So it’s so different, in so many different ways. The audience is different. In August of 2024, when the hardcover Book 1 came out, suddenly people were walking into stores and buying it and then posting about it on TikTok. My demographics went from maybe 90% male to now 40% male readers. So many more women readers are reading it and then they’re convincing their husbands and boyfriends, who don’t read, to read it. And that’s just caused an explosion in sales. We went from maybe 500,000 total sales to about 7 million at this point. And it’s just crazy. And that happened so fast that I had this rise. In literally the past 12 months, it’s just gone crazy, bonkers.
This interview has been edited and condensed.