Zelda fans already got a great new game with “Tears of the Kingdom” this year, but Nintendo just dropped another exciting piece of news: the gaming giant is working on Live action movie Based on the Legend of Zelda franchise.
Shigeru Miyamoto, the 37-year-old creator of the series, announced the news this evening.
“I’ve been working on The Legend of Zelda live-action film for many years now with Avi Arad-san, who has produced many successful films,” he wrote on X in a statement translated from Japanese. “I asked Avi-san to produce this film with me, and we have now officially begun development on the film with Nintendo itself heavily involved in the production. It will take some time to complete, but I hope you will look forward to seeing 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, the move makes a lot of sense for Nintendo. Although Link’s story has been unfolding for decades, the series is more exciting than ever. Breath of the Wild, a 2017 game released on the Nintendo Switch, has been hailed by both fans and critics as one of the greatest video games of all time (more realistically, one of the best games ever released on the Nintendo Switch, for which it continues to receive praise. Great). When the sequel, Tears of the Kingdom, was released earlier this year, it somehow managed to live up to huge fan expectations, achieving solid sales. 20 million copies From May until September.
So, if Nintendo saw fit to make a movie centered around Mario, a working-class plumber, why not tell the story of Link, a legendary hero who spans time and space?
When Nintendo announced that it was making “The Super Mario Bros. Movie” a few years ago, fans seemed a bit exhausted — and also confused about the casting of Chris Pratt as Mario. But the film was a shocking success, even for a product built on such an iconic intellectual property. The film grossed more than $1.3 billion, surpassing the top-grossing film, “Frozen.” The second highest-grossing animated film Absolutely (“Frozen II” holds the crown). The Pokémon franchise, another Nintendo cash cow, has been churning out movies and TV shows at breakneck speed for decades, even casting Ryan Gosling as Pikachu… so why not put the spotlight on Link this time?
We just hope Chris Pratt doesn’t audition to play Link.