Zelda fans already got a great new game this year with ‘Tears of the Kingdom,’ but Nintendo just dropped another exciting piece of news: the gaming giant is working on a live-action movie based on the Legend of Zelda franchise.
Shigeru Miyamoto, creator of the 37-year-old franchise, announced the news this evening.
“I have been working on the live-action film of The Legend of Zelda for many years with Avi Arad-san, who has produced many mega-hit films,” he wrote about X in a statement translated from Japanese. “I asked Avi-san to co-produce this film with me, and we have now officially started development of the film, with Nintendo itself closely involved in the production. It will take some time to complete, but I hope you are looking forward to it.”
Avi Arad has produced films like “Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse,” which won the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature, along with dozens of other Marvel films.
Although unexpected, this move makes a lot of sense for Nintendo. Although Link’s story has spanned decades, the franchise is hotter than ever. Breath of the Wild, the game released for the Nintendo Switch in 2017, has been praised by fans and critics alike as one of the best video games of all time (more realistically, it’s one of the best games released on the Nintendo Switch, namely still high praise). When the sequel, Tears of the Kingdom, was released earlier this year, it somehow managed to meet fans’ enormous expectations, selling 20 million copies from May to September.
So if Nintendo sees fit to make a movie about Mario, a working-class plumber, why not tell the story of Link, a legendary hero who spans time and space?
When Nintendo announced a few years ago that it was launching ‘The Super Mario Bros. Movie’, fans seemed a little jaded — and also confused about the casting of Chris Pratt as Mario. But the film was shockingly successful, even for a product built on such an iconic IP. The film grossed over $1.3 billion, surpassing “Frozen” as the second highest-grossing animated film ever (“Frozen II” takes the cake). Another Nintendo cash cow, the Pokémon franchise has been churning out movies and television shows at breakneck speed for decades, even featuring Ryan Gosling as Pikachu… So why not put Link in the spotlight this time?
We just hope Chris Pratt doesn’t audition to play Link.