This week, Netflix announced new content for fans of Arcane: League of Legends.
Unsurprisingly, the reaction of fans to the announcement has initially been very positive overall — fans love extra content, and Arcane fans are desperate for any crumbs to help tide us over until the next season is on our screens!
During Geeked Week, Netflix’s five-day-long event celebrating their genre shows, they announced Arcane: Bridging the Rift.
Bridging the Rift is a five-episode docuseries exploring the making of Arcane. At the moment, there’s not a huge amount of information about what the series will cover. The initial announcement from the official Arcane Twitter account was pretty deliberately vague, but luckily for us, more information followed during Geeked Week’s Animation Showcase.
Released on Twitter and YouTube, the follow-up teaser expanded a little on what “the story of how Arcane came to be” could mean. In the minute and a half long clip, we see the co-creators of the widely celebrated series, Riot Games’ Christian Linke and Alex Yee, explaining their close relationship with French animation studio Fortiche.
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Fortiche has a long history of working with Riot Games on numerous projects, starting with “Get Jinxed” in 2013 and continuing up until the recent masterpiece of Arcane‘s first season.
In the teaser clip, it looks as if fans will get to hear a little about all of those as well the journey that Linke and Yee’s relationship with Fortiche took. Fans will certainly be hoping to get a look behind the scenes at Fortiche, so that we can find out more about (and maybe even see some early work on) the animation of the cities of Piltover and Zaun, and all of their colorful inhabitants.
The show is being produced by Netflix but is being released exclusively on YouTube. It’s not the first time that Netflix has played around with its usual release rules and formats for Arcane — when season 1 released, Netflix allowed the first episode to be streamed in its entirety on Twitch by anyone who wanted to. It was the first time they’d done anything like that. It seemed to work well, putting the show in front of people who may otherwise have skipped it, thinking that maybe it was only for League of Legends diehards. (Definitely not true!)
Season 1 of Arcane introduced fans both old and new to Vi and Jinx, sisters separated by time and circumstance, whose choices have an explosive impact on the fate of their divided city and many of its other inhabitants. The series received rave reviews from both fans of the game and general audiences alike. Rotten Tomatoes doesn’t have a bad word to say about the gorgeously animated show; it awarded Arcane a 100% Average Tomatometer rating and a 98% Average Audience score. The series also has a 9.4 rating on IMDB. Within the same month as its release Arcane became the highest rated original series Netflix has produced.
Arcane fans have been waiting (im)patiently for season 2 of the mega-hit show. Unfortunately, there’s no release date confirmed and we’re unlikely to get it until 2023 at the earliest, though Riot Games have confirmed that it’s actively in production.
Hailee Steinfeld (Hawkeye, Dickinson), Ella Purnell (Yellowjackets, Star Trek: Prodigy), and Katie Leung (Harry Potter) will return as the voices of Vi, Jinx, and Caitlyn, respectively.
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It’s great news for Arcane lovers, though, that even in the unknown hiatus between seasons, it seems like Netflix and Riot Games are keeping fans in mind and providing us with content.
Arcane: Bridging the Rift will debut on Riot Games’ YouTube channel on August 4. For more news on Bridging the Rift, Arcane, and other exciting media, don’t forget to follow Nerds and Beyond!
