Netflix’s My Hero Academia movie draws inspiration from an unlikely show

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At first glance, Stephen King’s 1986 novel IT and the blockbuster anime My Hero Academia appear to occupy very different worlds. Yet both center on young outsiders facing enormous fear and isolation — and both works are unexpectedly linked through screenwriter Jason Fuchs.

Fuchs, whose credits include the espionage-tinged Argylle and the family-friendly Ice Age: Continental Drift, is co-showrunner on HBO’s IT prequel series Welcome to Derry, due to premiere on October 26, 2025. He’s also the screenwriter attached to the Netflix and Legendary live-action adaptation of My Hero Academia, so it’s perhaps inevitable he notices parallels between the two properties.

“When it comes to writing young characters, you just want to write to the emotional truth of it,” Fuchs told Polygon.

Breaking it down, Fuchs points out that Welcome to Derry — which is set 27 years before Andy Muschietti’s two IT films — revolves around a band of misfits who must unite to confront an ancient terror. He draws a parallel to My Hero Academia’s protagonist, Izuku “Deku” Midoriya, who starts out powerless in a society where superhuman abilities are the norm.

“In Welcome to Derry, we have a group of outsiders who have to come together to defeat a great evil,” Fuchs explained. “In My Hero Academia, we’re also writing about an outsider when it comes to someone like Deku, who doesn’t quite fit in because he doesn’t have the quirks of his contemporaries and peers. So yeah, I think there’s some commonality, but they’re such different stories that clearly go off into very different places.”

Details on the live-action My Hero Academia remain sparse — the project is still in its early development and has not been assigned a release date — so Fuchs couldn’t elaborate further. But when production does begin, he expects casting to draw from the same pool of young performers who can convincingly portray alienation and resilience.

“I’m in the middle of writing it right now, so we’ve not gotten to the casting portion of it,” he said. “But I will say that when we get around to making My Hero Academia, we should be lucky enough to find young actors who are as talented and gifted as this group was, and just lovely humans, too.”

Source: Polygon