Miraculous Corp and See-Saw Films are co-developing and co-producing a live-action series based on Miraculous: Tales of Ladybug & Cat Noir, moving the animated superhero property into a multi-season format designed for a wider and older audience. The adaptation will be written by Emme Hoy, writer and co-executive producer on season two of See-Saw’s Sweetpea, and will remain set in Paris.
Mediawan Rights will handle worldwide sales for the live-action show, while the companies expect it to run for multiple seasons. See-Saw Films, the drama producer behind Slow Horses and Heartstopper, and Miraculous Corp are both part of France’s Mediawan.
The franchise behind the adaptation
The animated original is distributed by Mediawan Kids and Family in more than 150 countries and appears on Disney Channel, Disney+, Netflix, Globo and TF1. It is currently in its sixth season, with season seven set to launch late this year.
Those placements are backed by an unusually large owned-audience base. Mediawan reports the franchise has 54 million YouTube subscribers, more than 55 billion lifetime views and roughly 900 million monthly views. The franchise also extends across film, gaming, consumer products and live experiences, which gives the live-action series multiple touchpoints to lean on. That demand signal makes the adaptation less of a cold start and more of an audience transfer.
Why this matters for buyers and planners
For streamers and linear networks, a live-action Miraculous is inventory that can sit in both kids and young-adult/family blocks. The announcement positions the series to widen its age profile while keeping the existing fan community, which matters because a broader age range usually means more advertising categories and a longer subscriber retention window.
- 54 million YouTube subscribers give the franchise a direct promotional channel for the new series.
- 55 billion lifetime views and 900 million monthly views indicate repeat engagement beyond linear broadcast windows.
- Multiple seasons and worldwide sales put Mediawan Rights in position to bundle live-action with existing animated rights.
What to do with it
Media planners and entertainment marketers should treat this as a franchise-extension case, not just a kids’ commission. It is a test of whether YouTube-native animation can be converted into appointment viewing for an older audience. The live-action version will be sold globally, so buyers should watch for territory deals and platform windows around Mediawan Rights’ slate rather than assuming it is automatically tied to the animated series’ current partners.
The key benchmark will be whether the series can hold the franchise’s existing YouTube and Disney/Netflix audience while pulling in viewers who know See-Saw from Heartstopper or Slow Horses. The writer’s Sweetpea background suggests the adaptation is being shaped as teen/young-adult drama rather than a straight kids’ show.
For ScreenStat readers, the live-action announcement matters less because it is another adaptation and more because it is a data-backed bet: a franchise with 55 billion lifetime views is being repositioned to age up its audience, and the sales process will reveal how much buyers pay for that kind of built-in demand.
Source: C21media
