Tears of the Kingdom
Shigeru Miyamoto temporarily took over Nintendo’s Twitter with little fanfare on Tuesday to announce a Legend of Zelda live action film. Such a film has been rumored to be in development for years, but this is the most forward momentum we’ve seen to date, no doubt in part inspired by the success of Nintendo’s animated Super Mario Bros. film this past year.
Miyamoto announced that he has been working with producer Avi Arad on the project for years, and a press release revealed that the movie is being directed by Wes Ball, while being financed by both Nintendo and Sony Pictures, an interesting pairing.
While Nintendo touts Avid Arad as having produced “many mega hit films,” his involvement has raised a few eyebrows in terms of the potential quality of such an important production like this.
It’s true, Arad has produced a number of big films, but the sense is that he’s been coasting on Spider-Man for a very, very long time now. Since 2012, 10 of his 17 projects have been Spider-Man films, and he’s been involved in really every major Spider-Man project, from Maguire to Garfield to Holland to Spider-Verse to now Sony’s bizarre Spider-Man-less Venom/Morbius universe. The idea is maybe this Spider-producer behind Morbius is not the best choice for a Legend of Zelda movie.
Morbius
The director in question, Wes Ball, is seemingly another odd pick. Ball has not directed a film since 2018 when he wrapped up his Maze Runner trilogy, an adaptation of a YA series back when things like Divergent and The Hunger Games were all the rage. Those films were…fine, but it’s a bit odd to see a director with little experience past that singular trilogy plucked for a massive project like this one. He was directing a (now cancelled) Mouse Guard movie, which has some neat art that may give us an indication that yeah, maybe he can get the vibe of Zelda right, but we’ll see.
Then there’s the writer, which Deadline, not Nintendo, has reported as working on the script. That would be Derek Connolly, who wrote the last three Jurassic Park movies, Dominion, Fallen Kingdom and World. He wrote the pretty good Detective Pikachu script, which is a built-in Nintendo connection. He apparently wrote a Rise of Skywalker draft that wasn’t actually used, it seems. But again it seems like a bit of an unusual choice here.
Really, there’s nothing about any of these three, Avi Arad, Wes Ball and Derek Connolly, that would make you jump out of your seat and start to get hyped for their work on a live-action Zelda movie. Granted, this is unfamiliar territory as Zelda almost seems borderline unadaptable in live action in the first place, but it does feel like Nintendo has picked some unorthodox partners for the project.
However, we should remember that similar skepticism occurred when it was revealed Illumination would make the Super Mario Bros. movie, the “Minions” studio. The end result there was…a pretty decent Mario movie that did what it needed to in order to make a billion dollars. And that’s probably the most likely path for Zelda here. Probably at best, a decent movie that again, will almost certainly make a billion dollars. That’s Nintendo for you.
I do have reservations about who has been handed the keys here, but now eyes turn toward casting the central roles of Link and Zelda, along with learning which storyline this movie may end up adapting, given all there is to choose from in the series’ history. But I wouldn’t expect to hear about that for a while.
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Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.
