Nintendo is going to take on Hollywood
Link, The Legend of Zelda, or The Super Mario Bros. in the Wild: Adapting a Game Franchise to a Movie
A game franchise that is best known for its silent main character and seemingly endless plot is being adapted into a movie by Nintendo. How do you adapt something like that into a two-hour film?
Link is moving from Hyrule to Hollywood. Coming off the $1.3 billion success of The Super Mario Bros. Movie, Nintendo announced Wednesday that it’s working on a live-action adaptation of The Legend of Zelda. Wes Ball will direct the movie, which will be financed by Sony, but it will take time until it hits theaters. The news sent gamers on a dream-casting spree and signaled the next big step in Nintendo’s quest to evolve from a video game company into a full-blown entertainment empire.
Why The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom is so GOOD that the art isn’t? A Simple Question for Nintendo
I do not want to assume that a piece of art is bad because it is based on existing intellectual property. If anything, I see it as a compelling challenge. Artists find themselves in a position where they face overwhelming entities driven by power yet they still have the courage to create and outsmart the systems within that want to consume everything. It’s how we get some of the best art we know.
All of that is the most head-in-ass, pretentious way to introduce a simple question: What would make a Legend of Zelda movie actually good? … This is ridiculous, cut all this.
Link is a twink of action. He communicates with his deeds. If somebody tells him that their village halfway across the world has been overrun by ruffians, Link just goes off on a days-long journey, blasts the ruffians to smithereens with his comically OP Zonai cannon spear, rebuilds the entire village, and then walks all the way back to shock his new acquaintance by wordlessly conveying that the job’s done – effectively leaving them speechless. Who needs to talk when you can do that?
I won’t have to argue again, but I will still attempt to take it further. Since the release of The Ocarina of Time, the three primary characters of the series—Link, Zelda, and Ganon(dorf)—have been represented by the three forces of the Triforce: Courage, Wisdom, and Power (respectively).
The Legend of Zelda is one of Nintendo’s oldest and most beloved franchises, where a silent, twinky hero named Link battles the forces of evil (usually a maladjusted guy named Gannon/dorf) with the help of princess Zelda. The company made the first game in the series in 1986 and has since released dozens more, including this year’s critically acclaimed The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom. The franchise is a series where each game is highly anticipated and successful, making it a heavy hitter for Nintendo. Tears of the Kingdom has sold 19.5 million copies since May.
Nintendo is expanding into the entertainment world with a film adaptation of the series. The movie The Super Mario Bros. Movie was the second highest-grossing animated movie of all time, edging out Frozen. The Mario movie is an excellent example of a video game franchise being able to be adapted into a full-length movie while still retaining the charm and appeal of the game.
The video game industry has been going big on film and TV projects for years, churning out projects that are either bad (Silent Hill, Resident Evil, Assassin’s Creed, I could go on), very bad (BloodRayne, 1993’s Super Mario Bros., Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time), or surprisingly great (The Last of Us, Sonic the Hedgehog, Detective Pikachu). Despite a long history of failures, studios seem to have cracked how to make good video game adaptations, and audiences have routinely turned out for them.
