The release of Riot Games’ first animated series, Arcane, has been met with raving reviews. After an extensive launch campaign that’s involved numerous celebratory features across all of Riot’s games, Arcane had a stellar debut and is already Netflix’s all-time top-rated original series, according to IMDb.
Although Arcane was just released and scores can start to fluctuate as the series develops and more episodes are released, the show’s initial reviews on some of the most prestigious critic sources are worth noting. The show is sitting at 100 percent on Rotten Tomatoes and a surprising 9.4/10 on IMDb.
Arcane currently stands at the top of IMDb’s database of highest-rated movies and TV shows tagged with the keyword “Netflix-original,” closely followed by Kota Factory with a 9.2/10 and The Last Dance with a 9.1/10. For a more audience-related comparison, The Witcher, which had a 91 percent audience score, only got an 8.2 on IMDb.
Arcane, which was released just a couple of days ago, is a new animated series developed by Riot Games in collaboration with Netflix and tells the story of two of League of Legends‘ most iconic champions. Set in the opposed cities of Piltover and Zaun, the series follows two sisters, Vi and Powder, who live in the outskirts ghetto of Piltover and find the corpses of their parents among the wreckage caused by turmoil between the undercity’s residents and the city’s cops.
The initial and unsurprising success of this project has made headlines all over the world and could very well have liberated the gaming industry from a long history of game-to-movie adaptation failures. While Arcane’s gaming-focused audience may limit its reach and keep it from obtaining viewer numbers such as those that Squid Game celebrated a few weeks ago, the success of this new show is an important milestone for both Netflix and Riot—and its success could well be the detonator for other gaming collaborations.
The next three episodes of Arcane will be released on Saturday, Nov. 13. The final three episodes of the season will drop the following Saturday, Nov. 20.
The first three episodes of Arcane are available now on Netflix.
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