Finding actors for Link and Zelda, fine. But who on Earth could do Ganondorf justice? How do you translate the Gerudo to live-action film? Black actors with red wigs? Mixed-race actors with red wigs? Mixed-race actors with their natural hair, straightened and dyed red?
There are some lighter-skinned Gerudo in BotW/TotK. Would the actors all be pretty monotonous in look to give them a coherent race identity?
It can but it won’t until he is dead. He has a reputation that he is impossible to work with. He somehow cannot find a successor in decades. That alone is a huge red flag for a boss. The people working at Ghibli started their own company, Studio Ponac, because they knew they would never be good enough to succeed in his eyes.
Link talking is as much of a deal breaker as Mario talking. But the people who love minions will sell their house to watch this film and buy all the merch so they’re still going to get millions.
If they keep the story small enough, it could work. If they try to cram the last 3 decades or lore and plot and characters into 1 movie, it’ll just fall apart
Any amount of past lore is a mistake. Zelda games are practically an anthology series. The timeline was cobbled together from stories that did not give a dang about fitting into an objective chronology.
It’s not called the History of Zelda. It’s a legend. Every telling is going to be half familiar, and half buck-wild.
I hope that’s how they do this movie. You have these three cosmically-entwined characters in a high-fantasy medieval situation on a land with a surprisingly consistent three-goddess pantheon. The writers can take or leave any of a dozen mythological races, like fish people, or bird people, or rock people, or… women… and use them really however the hell they want. Everything else should be fairly novel.
It’s not called the History of Zelda. It’s a legend. Every telling is going to be half familiar, and half buck-wild.
I love this. That’s a great way of putting it, and mirrors how I feel about the games in the series. Also about any long running universe that had multiple storytellers weaving through it.
From the director of Maze Runner, the screenwriter of The Rise of Skywalker and the producer of Mobius. I don’t see what could possibly go wrong with this movie.
I’m glad for the latest Mario movie entirely because of Jack Black as Bowser.
The Resident Evil films were pretty good, too. The Doom movie was at least as much fun as your standard B-movie shoot’em’up. Uncharted and the first Tomb Raider could have stood in for any Mummy and was head and shoulders above the last two Indiana films. The Street Fighter and Mortal Combat movies were middle-of-the-road genre films.
I don’t think Zelda has to fail on its face. But I think there’s a lot of places where the screenwriters can go wrong. Translating the dungeons in a Zelda game to the big screen will be difficult in a way a Tomb Raider or Far Cry aren’t. And working side-characters into a game that’s very explicitly a solo adventure will be hard.
I think they’d have had an easier time with Dragon Quest. I’m very confident they could make a good Metroid movie, since that’s just reskinning Aliens 2. But there are definitely examples of game-to-movie films working, so long as they fit with a traditional Hollywood script. Zelda just doesn’t do that well.
Arguably, whether this turns out decent or atrocious may depend, in part, on whether it’s a straight adaptation of the games (removes sensory elements that games and film don’t have in common, causing serious issues); or if it’s something that would fit better in a film, albeit taking place in Hyrule.
It may also depend on whether portions of the production team actively dislike the source material (cough cough Netflix Witcher cough cough)
It's about time. Nintendo's been toying with the idea of a Zelda movie for years, so I'm glad to see that something may finally come of it. I'm really interested to see who they're going to cast for this.
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