Live Action Zelda Movie in Development

[Moonface]

Nintendo have announced that it will develop a live-action film of The Legend of Zelda. The film will be produced by Shigeru Miyamoto, Representative Director and Fellow of Nintendo and Avi Arad, Chairman of Arad Productions Inc., who has produced many mega hit films, with direction by Wes Ball.

Interestingly, the film will be co-financed by Nintendo and Sony Pictures Entertainment Inc., with Nintendo financing more than 50% of the film and Sony taking charge of theatrical distribution.

Source: https://www.nintendo.co.jp/corporate/rel....html?s=09

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Well this certainly came out of nowhere it feels like. I saw someone drop this in a Twitch chat with zero context as to what the link was specifically for and didn't expect it to be for this. I also find it wild that Sony and Nintendo are both attached to this movie.

[Maniakkid25]

I will reserve judgment on whether or not the movie is gonna be decent or not, but when I saw "Live-action Zelda", I legitimately almost said "Oh no..." next to my manager. I have...several concerns, and most of them can be exemplified by the (as much as I love it) awful live-action Super Mario Brothers movie.

[Karo]

On one hand it does have someone that actually created the Legend of Zelda and Nintendo actual input so it could potentially be something there? I'm pretty sure the animated Mario Brother movie went over well, but I"m not quite sure if they should have done a live action LOZ or not, but we shall see how it turn out.

[Moonface]

The recent Mario movie was received well, and so was Detective Pikachu, but neither of those movies featured any main character from a Nintendo game as a live action person but as CG. With this movie most of the cast will not be CG and instead played by actors, which is going to be a very tough challenge when it comes to finding people who will be seen as a good fit. Although I think the hardest thing this movie has going for it, regardless of whether it's live action or CG, is Link as a character. There's no way they can keep him silent, but this is a character who has never spoken so to hear a voice isn't just going to be a little jarring but no matter what the voice is it will get the living hell scrutinized out of it.

I've also seen a lot of speculation over the story and what game it might pull from, and I agree with the overall consensus of the movie using OoT as its basis.

[ShiraNoMai]

I mean Mario was arguably almost as mute as Link and they somehow made it work for the Illumination film? It played into the Super Mario Bros. Movie (1993) style of him just being a regular Brooklyn dude. It'll be hard to really play that off with Link cuz he's not notably from anywhere other than the fictional Hyrule.

If it takes a more Middle-Earth or Westeros approach, that'd be neat. I can see it achieving a sort of level of mysticism of the Westeros/GoT style, but... man I don't know if Nintendo wants to pull this in a more child/family-friendly direction or keep with the tones of their respective universes.

It's gotta be OoT or MM era though. If it's OoT, they now have the struggle of finding not one but two Link actors (child and adult).

[Maniakkid25]

I'm gonna be the contrarian and disagree. While OoT is a good choice, I think the most cinematic Zelda game (or at least the easiest to transfer to a cinema experience) would be either Twilight Princess or Link's Awakening. Twilight Princess has it's own snag of then having to potentially film with an animal and all the headaches that brings, so that might be out on those grounds, but Ocarina of Time, I think, would need at least a two-part movie: one for Kid Link, and one for Adult Link, and I doubt that Nintendo is gonna foot that bill with a completely unproven franchise.

Or maybe they'll go left field and do a completely original story! Who knows? We'll see what happens. I just know that Live Action immediately raised hairs for me, because what's the last Live-Action video game adaptation that was actually decent, and wasn't explicitly for children? Tomb Raider 2018? Mortal Kombat 2021? MAYBE Five Nights at Freddy's? My point is that Live-action adaptations have been FAR more fraught than animated ones, so that's where my concern is.

[Mr EliteL]

Ah how blissfully unaware I was at first, completely blanked the Live-Action" bit and just went straight into "Ah, an LOZ film in the works, it must be CG, it might be worth seeing" then I noticed it. Oh no, all hope is lost now. Well for me at least anyway.

[Moonface]

I mean Mario was arguably almost as mute as Link and they somehow made it work for the Illumination film? It played into the Super Mario Bros. Movie (1993) style of him just being a regular Brooklyn dude. It'll be hard to really play that off with Link cuz he's not notably from anywhere other than the fictional Hyrule.

Fair point, although Mario at least was mute because his games haven't really been story heavy or needed him to talk. LoZ on the other hand is always story heavy, and although Link clearly communicates with people we never see or hear his dialogue because Nintendo want him to be a blank slate for the player. I did wonder if Link could work as being someone who barely talks and the dialogue is instead carried by a companion, but the problem there is it'll change Link into a character who doesn't communicate with anyone at all, compared to in-game where he does communicate but we just don't see/hear it. We just get left to fill in the gaps based on what the NPC's say in response to when Link is evidently telling them something through an animation of his character model.

If it takes a more Middle-Earth or Westeros approach, that'd be neat. I can see it achieving a sort of level of mysticism of the Westeros/GoT style, but... man I don't know if Nintendo wants to pull this in a more child/family-friendly direction or keep with the tones of their respective universes.

I don't see a need for Nintendo to change the tone to better suit the movies. The games are generally an all-ages affair anyway even with their dark tones, including TotK. If Nintendo were going to remove the darker tones of LoZ they would have already done it by now.

I'm gonna be the contrarian and disagree. While OoT is a good choice, I think the most cinematic Zelda game (or at least the easiest to transfer to a cinema experience) would be either Twilight Princess or Link's Awakening. Twilight Princess has it's own snag of then having to potentially film with an animal and all the headaches that brings, so that might be out on those grounds, but Ocarina of Time, I think, would need at least a two-part movie: one for Kid Link, and one for Adult Link, and I doubt that Nintendo is gonna foot that bill with a completely unproven franchise.

Didn't TP try to emulate the feeling of Lord of the Rings though to an extent due to the booming popularity of that franchise at the time? I think doing TP as a movie could run the risk of it being compared to LotR in some ways, plus it might be a lot to introduce people to both Hyrule and another kingdom at the same time.

Thinking on OoT again, I was wondering if the dungeons could just be stripped down/away but the problem is that they all cause a sage to occur and they're crucial to the story, so they have to stay in, so I agree that trying to get all of that game into one movie is probably too much actually. That said, I do wonder how dungeons would be handled in the movie in any form, since doing too many would surely affect the pacing because all of them regardless of the game are just one big puzzle and then a boss fight. Speedrunning through them will make them feel like a smaller deal than they should be, but giving them all good screen time is just going to take up so much time...

I just know that Live Action immediately raised hairs for me, because what's the last Live-Action video game adaptation that was actually decent, and wasn't explicitly for children? Tomb Raider 2018? Mortal Kombat 2021? MAYBE Five Nights at Freddy's? My point is that Live-action adaptations have been FAR more fraught than animated ones, so that's where my concern is.

If it counts, maybe Detective Pikachu? That seemed to be a pretty all-ages movie that was a live-action/CG hybrid, which is what this movie would likely end up being since I doubt they'll go for practical effects when it comes to most of the enemies in LoZ and especially the bosses.

[Maniakkid25]

But Detective Pikachu is, let's be honest, a kid's film. Zelda, while not R-rated by any circumstance, definitely would be targeted at a much older demographic (maybe even hit that sweet, sweet PG-13 rating). That's why I asked about movies that weren't kid's films. Detective Pikachu did well, and Super Mario BROKE A BILLION IN SALES, but the more mature crowd? The best-selling movie was WARCRAFT, which failed to break even and was considered terrible. The first arguably good movie on the list is Uncharted, which I had completely forgotten it existed!

If TP did try to ape LotR movies, that only confirms my point about it being a more cinema-friendly option. Plus, Legend of Zelda in general was inspired by Lord of the Rings. Let's be honest here: most sword-and-sorcery high fantasy has a direct lineage to it. Plus, with the two decades of separation between that movie series' original release and now? Only super fans and people digging will recognize the connection.

[Moonface]

Ah, by explicitly for children I took that to mean stuff like that new animated Trolls movie where it isn't really aimed to all ages like Mario and Detective Pikachu were (in the sense that adults likely saw those two movies in droves even without kids whereas Trolls is unlikely to get many adults attending screenings without kids in tow).

Huh, I never knew the LoZ franchise as a whole took inspiration from LotR. I always thought it was just Twilight Princess that was inspired by it because of the popularity of the movies at the time and how LoZ had enough overlap for a game to take visual inspiration from it while the iron was hot to strike.


Something I had cross my mind just now was whether or not the cast this movie gets will remain as the cast for a sequel. With all the timelines Zelda branches into and the different appearances Link has had throughout those, Nintendo could change up the cast over time similar to how the James Bond franchise does since they have a way to explain the cast changing in lore. It would probably also help to distinguish separate timelines in the movies if the cast only stays consistent within its own timeline, but then again do we think Nintendo will dare to explore all the timelines in movies like they did with the games?