Netflix’s Guardians of Justice is Adi Shankar’s Batman-loving dream come true

A 23-year-old Adi Shankar rolled into Los Angeles in 2009 without a clue of how to make movies or TV shows, but he did have comic book legend Todd McFarlane’s office number. So the scrappy Indian kid, fresh off quitting his job at Discover Card, rang McFarlane — over and over and over again until someone picked up. When McFarlane finally answered, Shankar didn’t mince words. “I told him everyone was a loser and I should be doing the Spawn movie,” Shankar recalls. McFarlane was … baffled. McFarlane was absolutely baffled that he would grant Spawn rights to a child. However, he was willing to go to Shankar’s for coffee to share some tips on breaking in. He absorbed every word.

Shankar has never had a daydream he couldn’t manifest into some form of reality. While the producer’s most mainstream hit, Netflix’s animated series Castlevania, might seem like run-of-the-mill adaptation in the era of slapdash IP conversion, for Shankar it was another moment of calling his shot — and in that case, literally making it happen. “I showed up to Los Angeles and I wanted to make Mortal Kombat, Duke NukemPlease see the following: Spawn,” he says of his early days of being a video game kid with big ideas. “Like, that’s it. I didn’t give a shit about anything else.”

Six years ago, the producer “wanted to make a fucking Batman movie without any adults around.” As with SpawnDC granted his wish, but the odds of that happening were low. Shankar made it work his own way and put it all together over the years. Guardians of JusticeThe mysteriously creeping onto Netflix March 1st, is no longer available. Technically a Batman movie, but it does star one of Shankar’s idols, three-time WCW World Heavyweight Champion Diamond Dallas Page, as Knight Hawk, a gravelly, cowl-wearing mere mortal hero tasked with investigating the untimely death of his superhuman pal Marvelous Man in order to avert nuclear war. This seven-episode series, which combines live action with 3D and 2D animation, claymation as well 8-bit retro games art, vaporwave las lights and paper cutouts to defy the super-hero conventions of DC and Marvel, is an experiment in mixed media. Parts feel like Robert Rodriguez’s Sin City, others like MTV’s Liquid Television, and a few bits even recall the seminal 1964 alternate history mockumentary This is what it looked like. Denise Richards is among the actors. Jane Seymour, Andy Milonakis and Kellan Lutz are also part of this cast. Twilight. Cyborg T. rexes attack Syria. The fake president’s name is Nicholas E. Nukem. That’s not the only thing that can go wrong. Mortal Kombat itch. Shankar calls this his most personal project.

Images: Netflix/Bootleg Universe

Shankar used to be on the prestige track. After his meeting with Todd McFarlane, Shankar earned executive producer credits for films such as Machine Gun Preacher, GreyBrad Pitt’s vehicle You can kill them softlyPlease see the following: Dredd. But he switched gears with 2012’s The Punisher: Dirty Laundry, a rough-around-the-edges short film that resurrected Thomas Jane’s take on the character from Marvel’s maligned 2004 adaptation — albeit without Marvel’s permission, the rights to Punisher, or two fucks about any greater comic book mythology. The short launched Shankar’s so-called Bootleg Universe of unauthorized shorts, a series that would include riffs like Journalism’s Truth: Venom The End of Pokémon, and a new persona: a spotlight-seeking, bad-mouthing, harlequin-makeup-wearing rebel version of himself that could command the floors of comics conventions around the world. “Adi Shankar” became the heel of Hollywood, and wooed geeks who were dying to see their favorite properties translated from four-quadrant blockbusters into edgier one-quadrant YouTube videos. In interviews with IGN and the geek blogs of the 2010s, Shankar talked about comic books and anti-establishment filmmaking like David Bowie’s alien from The Man Who Stole Earth. He was the embodiment of Bootleg spirit and earned him a reputation for making each video an experience.

“I’d go home and laugh because I thought I was hysterical — I would basically just be quoting wrestlers,” he says. Shankar felt already excluded and created the whole scheme. “When I showed up [in Los Angeles], I realized there really weren’t brown people. There aren’t people that look like me on television. It was one angle that I could see the dearth of possibilities. […] and doing serious interviews with the trades and going to red carpets with makeup on and literally not breaking character was also a fuck-you to a system that I felt like was literally not allowing me to participate in certain verticals because I didn’t look a certain way.”

Shankar has had only minor encounters with titans throughout the years. Following the 2017 documentary release Apu’s Problem, Shankar set up a spec script contest for nonprofessional writers to “solve” Hank Azaria’s Indian character, a stunt that provoked the ire of The Simpsons’ longtime showrunner Al Jean. But Shankar’s provocateurship earned him a reputation that, today, he can’t quite shake, even as he leaves the makeup and wrestling-inspired behavior behind him.

“I’m not a dark dude,” he says, “more of a Peter Pan, like someone who never grew up.” Shankar blames a childhood in isolation, and life bouncing from India to Singapore to Hong Kong as his dad took new jobs, and a perpetual role as the weird kid who maintained a steady diet of pro wrestling. “When you weave in and out of different cultures, you realize that there are no norms; there are just different ways of existing. And so I didn’t know how to behave around people when I got into groups. I’m more comfortable with it now, obviously, because I can have a conversation with you and not be cutting a wrestling promo. When people asked me questions, I’d tell them how great I was. Of all time.”

His 1981 religion-infused novel Valis, Philip K. Dick describes psychosis as “a dream breaking through during waking hours.” The same might be said for a certain strain of Hollywood-induced delirium; Shankar is perfectly adjusted and engrossed while speaking over Zoom from his Los Angeles home, but as his whirring, high-impulse memory unloads the highs and lows of his personal timeline, it’s clear that he’s spent a great deal of his life riding the edge of reality. His vision for what his life should look like, what the entertainment industry should look like, what a gritty Power Rangers movie should look like — it all bursts out of him with seismic effect, blowing any little discerning voices in his head back into their corners. Adi Shankar does not ThatDifferent from Adi Shankar, Makeup-Wearing Adi. Getting where he is today might make more grounded individuals’ heads spin.

Todd McFarlane’s was not the only door Shankar knocked on in his early days. According to him, at the time he moved from Chicago to California information about the entertainment business was scarce even for the most connected millennial. The Graduate The Thing producer Lawrence Turman’s 2005 book Are You a Producer? became something of a bible, but a book was just a book — he needed to learn how stuff ReallyHe was successful. The rest of his life turned into a series of desperate cold calls and beggars. However, those who heard his pleas would often blow smoke in his face.

“When industry people talked about stuff, they would always talk in terms of metaphors, and it would fucking piss me off!” Shankar says. “They’d be like, ‘Well, getting a project made is kind of like breading a pudding.’ Are you serious? So, I had to kind of grab people and be like, ‘Tell me what this thing is.’”

When he began to act the role, he received answers. Shankar said that he was a bit naive and spent several weeks wandering aimlessly on the Paramount Pictures lot wearing a suit. One day, he and a buddy who worked in the mailroom were milling about outside of producer Jason Shuman’s office when they cracked a joke about Rob Schneider just a few short seconds before Rob Schneider himself walked into the office. An ex-partner instead of getting scammed by him.SNL star, Shankar groveled — and convinced Shuman to go out for coffee and give him a download on the working world. Around the same time, Shankar says, he also memorized every writer, agent, and script on the annual Black List, the industry’s go-to list of buzzy, unproduced screenplays. “After that, I was able to talk to people like I’d been an executive in Hollywood,” he says.

The equation for how Shankar wound up producing Brad Pitt movies alongside Annapurna’s Megan Ellison remains, even after many conversations, understated and demythologized, compared to the rest of his life. Shankar insists he was never the money guy, but the early output of his production company 1984 Private Defense Contractors, founded in 2010, makes him “feel kind of ashamed” today. “I was trying to figure out what the hell would actually work, and I was throwing a thousand things at the wall,” he says. Horton Foote was a legendary screenwriter and playwright. To Kill A MockingbirdThe screenplay was being written by a friend. After securing the rights, luring in Colin Firth by going straight to British agents, and convincing the deep-pocketed Ellison to put up the money, he had a movie: 2010’s Main Street. The dismal reception combined with the movie’s vanilla flavor makes it something Shankar would like to never think about ever again. But it opened doors — he was suddenly talking business with everyone from Twilight’s Stephenie Meyer to visionary filmmaker Tarsem Singh.

“I went from being impressed by meeting the third editor on a Leprechaun movie to, like, Holy fuck, I’m meeting with James Mangold and he’s talking to me about a movie he’s working on,” Shankar says. “I had massive impostor syndrome … and it wasn’t even impostor syndrome. I was just a fucking impostor.”

The “impostor” was great in a room, and a welcome ally to revered artists who would never in a million years direct a Mortal Kombat movie. Though there were directors who were strictly business partners (“I wish Joe Carnahan and I were closer,” Shankar says of the director of Grey, “but I was just scared of him”), others became guiding stars for his evolving career. He remembers his loved ones in Guardians of Justice: The show’s version of Superman’s Metropolis is “Dominikopolis,” named for You can kill them softlyDirector Andrew Dominik. Later in the series viewers are taken to Satrapi Isle. PersepolisMarjane Strapi (writer), directed Shankar-produced film in 2014. The Voices.

Shankar’s whirlwind career is defined by dreams, but he’s had his fair share of waking nightmares. Shankar says that his life changed forever when doctors wrongly diagnosed him with lymphoma while he was in Northwestern college. He believes that the Chicago virus sent Shankar into a spiral of mono-induced paralysis. However, doctors found enough evidence to recommend chemotherapy. “One day, I come out of this [PET] machine and they’re like, Whatever you had, it’s gone. It’s a miracle,” he says. “It ended up becoming a defining moment because I looked at my life when that happened and I was like, I’m doing all these things that I’m supposed to do and I feel supremely fucked over right now. The thing I wanted was to join the theatre program. It was my dream to do creative things. And I found myself, “like” Really anti-authority.”

Image: Netflix/Bootleg Universe

Images: Netflix/Bootleg Universe

One of the most unusual casting options in Guardians of Justice is Shankar’s decision to cast himself in a key role. Not because Shankar doesn’t have acting skills — he appeared alongside Ryan Reynolds in The VoicesHe was offered a role as a co-star in the comedy thriller Give the gift of love to the woman you loveHe is a natural beauty, as his black-and-white years prove. However, in Guardians,He plays Lockwood, the evil villain who is a thinly disguised Lex Luthor. The DC parallels don’t end there: Fearing the ultra-powerful Marvelous Man, Lockwood creates a bullet out of caltroninte — the core mineral of the hero’s home planet, Caltron — as protection against the impervious crusader. Marvelous Man uses the bullet to commit suicide within the first minutes of the series. Shankar says he only wound up playing one of the Guardians’ nemeses after a famous face fell through, but understands my impulse to see the whole thing as a bit Freudian. He is the villain, or the hero. Do all characters have to be in? Guardians of JusticeAre there other versions of his psyches?

Shankar acknowledges that the effects of his cancer experience split him into two people: the one who was a superhuman mover and shaker, but could not get to meet with anyone and the other who was a game-loving child whose nomad childhood and crumbling college experiences left him without a foothold. He was still spiraling despite all his success. “It wasn’t like I had anything, really, to point to,” he says. “But I used to be very tightly wound, physically. Like, literally, my body was kind of clenched in.” After months of dwelling in depression, Shankar went to a doctor who immediately prescribed Zoloft. He claims that the Zoloft effect broke him free from a depression in just 15 minutes. He changed his diet and began working with an a nutritionist the next year. Dancing with the StarsVeteran who gave him a Rolfing regimen, which was holistic physical therapy that was designed to improve his spine. Though Shankar describes the process as excruciatingly painful, it all sounds perfectly natural for someone who’s been willing to pivot his entire life on a whim. The ideas are endless in this new era of gloopy bliss. Guardians of Justice came into view.

“As the medicine was kicking in, I went, Man, what if I was Wolverine and Wolverine can’t get drunk because I couldn’t metabolize the medicine? Do you think his mind has a healing power? What if I were Superman? You could literally be an alien. I’m an immigrant. I’m not from America. I came here by myself when I was 15, so there’s a level at which I constantly feel like this outsider. That’s where it came from. What if my body couldn’t metabolize this medicine that helped me, and I was super feeling the way I was feeling?” That’s just the setup: Beyond episode 1, Shankar finds room for a straightforward murder mystery, microdigressions on the quirks of legacy superhero characters, and a bigger-picture rumination on capitalism’s influence on global violence and the inevitability of World War III, which feels all the more tense in light of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Images: Netflix/Bootleg Universe

This series is chock-full of ideas, it’s sometimes hard to see Shankar as an individual or where he sees his purpose in life. Although he has had many mentors in his lifetime, a few close friends have been mentioned by him. In 2019, an arranged marriage that he describes as a positive relationship in his life ended after his family’s astrologer broke them up. “They’re like, Your times don’t match. You’re talking about what the fuck? They’re like, No, you’ll die. You will all die. There won’t be kids, but if there are kids, the kids will die. Like, what the fuck?” Shankar is relieved to report that he is currently dating someone — and finally coming out the other side health-wise. SIBO is a chronic digestive condition that Shankar says was brought on by the use of antibiotics. Shankar, in addition to resolving his own problems, is seeking relief from the fact that he no longer works. Guardians of Justice. He describes himself as a “control freak,” and says that the raised stakes of each Bootleg project made the six-year process of filming and animating each bit of the ambitious series more daunting. “I think the notion that I had any sort of fan base or people that were following me was a mindfuck,” he says. “I had this intense pressure on myself to not let anybody down.”

It seems that the pressure is entirely self-created. In 2017, all of Shankar’s interests collided in his first collaboration with Netflix: the adult-friendly animated series Castlevania. Based on the hit Konami franchise, the series was a rejection of every blockbuster-aping video game adaptation before it, with Shankar collaborating with comic book writer Warren Ellis and Powerhouse Animation Studios to render a bloody, faithful saga based on the games’ plotlines. Shankar lost his gambling interests and the series came to be. Shankar recalled that he was unable to recall this incident until later. The Punisher: Dirty LaundryThe video was first seen on YouTube. Netflix executive Erik Barmack entered his Twitter DMs in an effort to show some appreciation and get his thoughts. Five years later Shankar would be bringing Barmack. Castlevania. It would be the beginning of an adult-animation revolution on the streaming site. Shankar was just trying to do cool things. “We said Castlevania was dope in 2017,” he says. “Today, it’s a business model.”

Castlevania goes down easy — with anime style, the game adaptation feels like Shankar doing fans a solid and protecting a much beloved story in its trip to screen. Guardians of JusticeIt feels like the antithesis of reality, an exchange for chips in order to get something on Netflix. But it feels more authentic than that. Shankar got the money to remix the most popular streaming site on the globe. Little China: Big TroubleDC Comics The Animatrix, Wrestlemania, Natural Born Killers, Mortal Kombat, Grand Theft Auto 5, and the deepest rumblings of his psyche, into seven episodes of … something that isn’t traditional television (Shankar says in the early stages, he even envisioned the project as a series of vlogs starring Tom Welling in his SmallvilleSuperman costume And true to Bootlegs past, the series has an indie sheen — no one would mistake the close-quarters action or raw animation styles for any of Netflix’s many nine-figure-budgeted tentpole series. To work on the show’s many disparate elements, Shankar wrangled a fleet of YouTube creatives, who imbued each episode’s noir plot with vulgar visual ecstasy.

Image: Netflix/Bootleg Universe

“When I was making this, it started feeling like all TV shows exist in the same universe,” he says. “I don’t know how this evolved this way, but there is a tiered system in terms of ‘this is an A-level look’ and ‘this is a C-level look.’ And everyone’s trying to achieve the same A-level look. And the things that aren’t are seen as ‘not good’ just because the A-level look is easier to achieve now.”

This rejection of norms has led to a deluge of interest from major studios that hope Shankar can break their IP into new mediums — and maybe just break them in general. Ubisoft provided the key to Ubisoft’s character library, which was given to Shankar for his animated Netflix series. Captain Laserhawk, which Shankar describes as “Captain N, The Game Master but good,” referencing Nintendo’s late-’80s attempt at an epic crossover cartoon. He’s still at toiling away on a Devil May Cry animator, Alx Preston working with him to bring multiple genre-bending season of anime. Hyper Light DrifterTelevision show for a yet-to-be determined platform. Krafton also recently appointed him as the head of a spinoff on the PUBG Universe.

However Guardians of Justice didn’t receive a major push from Netflix, it’s a personal milestone for Shankar. It contains remnants of many people from Shankar’s past. Gone are Kid Adi, the guy who’d try anything; geek icon “Adi Shankar” of the San Diego Comic-Con circuit; and a spiritual Adi whose physical shell was mangled by the malevolent forces of the natural world. Dropping is what he calls it. Guardians of Justice on a random Tuesday in March “has felt like a burden that I’m releasing.” And he could not be more excited for what’s to come. The version of Shankar that’s been around since the beginning, and the one who will prevail, is the hype man. His dreams become our dreams, too.

The seven episode of Guardians of JusticeThe first season is available now on Netflix