The video game-to-Hollywood pipeline is prepping for a doozy. A24 announced Elden Ring is the latest hit game slated to get a live-action adaptation, with Ex Machina and Civil War’s Alex Garland signed on to direct. What exactly the result will be is anyone’s guess, and fans aren’t quite sure whether to praise the sun or get ready for a flop.
The brutal but massively acclaimed 2022 action-RPG has sold over 30 million copies, making it a straightforward choice for Hollywood to take a shot at in terms of the financial upside. But while some game movies have recently hit big at the box office, like Sonic, Mario, and Minecraft, others aimed at more mature audiences—like Borderlands—have been epic failures.
The Elden Ring project doesn’t have a tentative release date yet and about the only other thing we know so far is that the production team includes some combination of: Peter Rice, Andrew Macdonald, Allon Reich, Vince Gerardis, and George R. R. Martin. That last name is important not just because he’s the author behind the Game of Thrones, but also because he collaborated with FromSoftware on Elden Ring’s story and world building.
Precisely how much he was involved remains up for debate. Martin seems happy to involve himself in any creative endeavor that will delay him from finally finishing the last two books in his Song of Fire and Ice fantasy series, The Winds of Winter and A Dream of Spring. Elden Ring fans, a famously chill bunch, aren’t sure how to feel about the whole thing.
Garland has been on a writing and directing blitz. Following his acclaimed sci-fi horror Ex Machina and his adaptation of the Annihilation books, he’s recently put out the American political horror flick Civil War, this year’s Iraq invasion movie Warfare, and a bunch of 28 Days Later spin-offs. How would his horror chops influence Elden Ring on the big screen?
Given it’s an A24 production, there’s a good chance Garland and company will have a lot of latitude with the mood of an Elden Ring movie and how it’s shot, with more artistic license than a conventional game adaptation aimed at a mass audience might be offered. And of course there’s whatever role publisher Bandai Namco will play in all of this, as well as FromSoftware itself. Director Hidetaka Miyazaki has been integral to the studio’s unique brand of storytelling, including Elden Ring, but has no confirmed role in the adaptation at the moment.
You should actually watch an interview Garland did with Naughty Dog’s Neil Druckmann if you want to get a good sense of how he thinks about storytelling in games and movies. I can imagine a very stoic, near wordless script that focuses an Elden Ring movie primarily on the mythology and horror of The Lands Between, which is in some ways comparable to zombie Camelot.
FromSoftware’s boss creature designs, extravagant and larger-than-life, seem like a challenging fit for a live-action production without a Disney-level budget for special effects. Then again, the team on Godzilla Minus One proved you don’t need tons of money to make an incredible-looking monster movie. I wonder if Guillermo del Toro was offered a shot at Elden Ring and passed. It certainly seems more up his alley than Garland’s.
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