‘Solo Leveling’ Season 3? Best I Can Do Is A Netflix Live-Action Adaptation

Fans are waiting for news about the return of Solo Leveling for season 3, which has now become Crunchyroll’s most-watched anime of all time. Well, good news and bad news on that front. More Solo Leveling is coming. It’s not season 3. It’s a newly announced live-action adaptation coming to, you guessed it, Netflix.

Netflix has just announced the news without many details, except a very important one. It’s revealed that actor Byeon Woo-seok will play the lead character in Solo Leveling, Sung Jin-woo. No matter what you think of the concept of the adaptation, fans have been quick to say that yeah, Woo-seok is a dead ringer for Jin-woo:

There is, however, a whole lot of skepticism about this concept, as comes with any live-action adaptation. Netflix does have a halfway decent track record with this between attempts like Avatar: The Last Airbender and genuine hits like One Piece.

Solo Leveling? It will be…odd. The concept of the series is that Jin-woo lives in a world where “Hunters” can emerge in society at a certain rank, E through S, a wide range of power levels from borderline useless to borderline godlike. Jin-woo, a clumsy E-rank, one day is gifted the ability to become a “Player” and becomes the only Hunter in the world who can increase his rank over time, something no other Hunter can do.

The whole series is him powering up to take on tougher and tougher foes, doing so through literally living out a video game through floating menus, XP gains, loot drops and specific moves that he learns that use mana. Again, he’s the only one who can do this, and his ascent across two seasons is wild.

This playing out in live-action would seem to require a huge budget, given that the entire series is essentially fighting giant monsters with inhuman powers. Not that it’s impossible, but the idea has certainly received some side-eye from fans who really just want the anime to come back. Of course, if it’s great, that would be nice, but it’s a tall order.

There is no date given for the release of this live-action Solo Leveling adaptation, just this casting. For reference, Netflix began development of One Piece way back in January 2020. It premiered in August 2023, so it may be quite the wait for Solo Leveling from here. But if the lead is already cast, perhaps that time can be cut down a bit. We’ll see.

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