Have you read Dungeon Crawler Carl? It’s a really big book series right now. Just ask your best friend; they’re probably knee-deep into it as we speak. The sci-fi adventure—and arguably the one book that’s mainstreaming the LitRPG genre for English-speaking Western readers—is on its way to Peacock as a new TV series. At San Diego Comic-Con, the author made one very important announcement.
On July 23, Dungeon Crawler Carl author Matt Dinniman appeared on a “spotlight” panel at San Diego Comic-Con, which kicks off this week in California. Dinniman announced that actor Jeff Hays will voice the fan-favourite character Princess Donut, a beloved Persian cat who often steals the spotlight in the series. Hays is already the voiceover narrator for the Dungeon Crawler Carl audiobooks, which is sure to tie the readers’ experience with the books to the show in a very neat way.
Hays’ casting as Princess Donut is the first and thus far only casting news for Dungeon Crawler Carl, which was first reported in August 2024 by Deadline to be in development as a series under Seth MacFarlane’s Fuzzy Door. This past June, MacFarlane announced the project was sold to Peacock, where it will stream at an unknown date.
In April 2026, to promote his standalone novel Operation Bounce House, Dinniman confirmed to Variety the show will be live-action. He also acknowledged the fan demand for animation. “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 live action,” he 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.”
The Dungeon Crawler Carl series began in 2020, when Dinniman released the first book as a self-published effort on Amazon; the print rights were acquired by Penguin Random House in 2024. The story centers on Carl, a US Coast Guard veteran, who, with his ex-girlfriend’s prized cat, enters an intergalactic game show in which Carl and Donut must survive multiple levels of hazardous dungeons. It’s basically The Running Man meets Ready Player One, with the snappy humour of James Gunn’s movies. There are already eight books on shelves now, with two more planned to end the series.
Dungeon Crawler Carl is notably the leading example of LitRPG, or literary role-playing game, for Western readers. The genre started in Asia, where stories took inspiration from role-playing games like Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy to tell stories about heroes who “level up” as the plot unfolds. Dungeon Crawler Carl openly takes inspiration from Western RPGs, with Dinniman specifically citing RuneScape, Rogue, and Fallout as his biggest touchstones for the books.
