A few weeks ago, a rumor started circulating online. Alex Garland (who’d made some noises about stepping back from directing after the release of Civil War, and then some angrier noises when people took those comments more seriously than he apparently intended) might be writing and directing a live-action film based on From Software’s massively best-selling video game Elden Ring. This rumor sounded depressingly plausible, in so far as making a movie out of a hugely successful game like Elden Ring is the sort of surface level-obvious, subtly awful idea you can imagine a bunch of Money Types getting thoroughly behind, and today it turns out to have been true: Garland is writing and directing an Elden Ring movie for A24.
To call our reaction to this concept “skeptical” would be an exercise in understatement, and that’s with no disrespect intended toward Garland. If we had to choose a single Hollywood director to tackle Elden Ring‘s sprawling, ambiguous story, set in a dying world where the gods have fallen and the rot is setting in from all sides, Garland would at least be an interesting pick. (There are, for instance, similarities between the game’s The Lands Between and Annihilation‘s The Shimmer even beyond the distressing things that tend to happen to biology within them, if you’re looking to draw parallels.) It’s just that Elden Ring is not just a masterpiece, but one whose brilliance is derived almost entirely from things that can only happen in video games. It’s nigh impossible, from this vantage, to see how its beauty, its loneliness, its sheer vastness, is going to translate into a two-hour film.
For those unfamiliar: Elden Ring drops players into the boots of a Tarnished, a resurrected warrior tasked with fighting their way to a golden city and re-forging the fabled Elden Ring. Along the way, you become immersed in the mythology of a royal family/godly pantheon (pulled from a story originally penned by George R.R. Martin, although his involvement with the actual game was famously pretty hands-off) who are directly responsible for the post-apocalyptic state of the world. It’s a game of big characters, but even bigger distances: Much of its 100-plus hours of playtime are spent navigating huge vistas and sprawling cities, hunting down new equipment and tiny breadcrumbs of its deliberately fractured plot.
Can you see why we’re skeptical now? The amount of condensing Garland is going to have to do here is utterly daunting; this isn’t The Last Of Us, where a very recognizable story can be rebuilt easily in a new medium. This is going to have to be so abstracted that calling it an adaptation will strain the limits of credulity.
But, hey, what do we know? We also didn’t think you could make a Minecraft movie, and $931 million in screamed “Chicken jockey!”s pretty definitively proved us wrong. In any case, Elden Ring the movie is happening; the movie is being produced for A24 and Bandai Namco Entertainment by Peter Rice, alongside Andrew Macdonald and Allon Reich from DNA, and George R. R. Martin and Vince Gerardis.
