PUBG is heading to Netflix as a live-action series. KRAFTON confirmed on October 29 that an adaptation of PUBG: BATTLEGROUNDS is in development at the streamer, with Donald Glover attached to direct, write, executive produce and star. It is the most concrete step yet in turning the game that took battle royale mainstream into a screen property, although the project is still early: no premise, no wider cast and no release window have been announced.
Who is making it
Glover is the centre of the project. Best known for creating and leading Atlanta and for his years on Community, he takes on four roles here at once: director, writer, executive producer and lead actor. His brother Stephen Glover, who worked alongside him on Atlanta, joins as a writer and executive producer.
The rest of the producing team comes from three companies. Michael Schaefer executive produces for NEON TV, the television arm of the film distributor NEON. Fam Udeorji, Glover's long-time manager and creative partner, executive produces for Gilga, the Glover-founded company. And KRAFTON itself is directly involved through LV3H, its subsidiary focused on entertainment content, represented by executive producers Taeseok Jang and Sujin Lee.
That last point matters. Rather than simply licensing the name and stepping back, KRAFTON has its own producers on the series, which gives the publisher a direct hand in how its biggest franchise is translated to the screen.
What we do not know yet
Almost everything about the show itself is still under wraps. Neither KRAFTON nor Netflix has described a plot, named any cast beyond Glover, or given an episode count or a release window. At this stage the announcement is about the creative team, not the story.
That is a genuinely open question for a PUBG adaptation, because the game has never been built around a fixed narrative. A match drops up to 100 players onto an island with nothing, leaves them to scavenge weapons and gear, and squeezes them together with a shrinking play zone until one player or squad is left. There is no campaign, no central hero and no canon cast of characters to lift straight onto the screen. Whatever Glover and his team build will largely be new, using the premise, the maps and the look of the game as a starting point.
Where PUBG stands today
PUBG: BATTLEGROUNDS launched in Steam Early Access in March 2017 and hit version 1.0 that December. It quickly became one of the best-selling games of its era, passing 75 million copies sold before KRAFTON moved it to a free-to-play model in January 2022. It remains a fixture of Steam's most-played charts nearly a decade on, and its mobile counterpart, PUBG MOBILE, has been one of the biggest games on phones worldwide.
The game also gave the battle royale format much of its modern vocabulary. Parachuting in from a plane, looting buildings for gear, racing a closing circle and chasing the "winner winner chicken dinner" screen all became genre conventions, picked up by many of the battle royale games that followed.
Part of a bigger wave
The PUBG series joins a growing list of game adaptations at Netflix, which also has a live-action Assassin's Creed series in the works. Across the industry, publishers have become far more willing to turn their games into film and television after a string of high-profile successes, and KRAFTON setting up its own entertainment-focused label in LV3H shows it wants to be part of that push rather than watch from the sidelines.
For now, PUBG players have a creative team, a home on Netflix and not much else. Expect casting news and a first look to be the next milestones, but with scripting still ahead of it, the show is unlikely to arrive any time soon.
