Shigeru Miyamoto temporarily took over Nintendo’s Twitter on Tuesday with little fanfare to announce a live-action Legend of Zelda movie. Such a film is rumored to have been in development for years, but this is the most complex push seen to date, possibly encouraged. thanks in part to the success of the animated film Super Mario Bros. last year.
Miyamoto announced that he had been working with manufacturer Avi Arad on the project for years, and a press release revealed that the film was directed by Wes Ball, while it was also financed by Nintendo and Sony Pictures, an attractive duo.
While Nintendo touts Avid Arad for having produced “many blockbuster movies,” its involvement has drawn attention in terms of the quality of such a mammoth production.
It’s true, Arad has produced several wonderful movies, but the feeling is that he’s been revolving around Spider-Man for a long, long time. Since 2012, 10 of his 17 projects have been Spider-Man movies, and he’s been involved in every major Spider-Man project, from Maguire to Garfield, Holland, Spider-Verse, and now Sony’s bizarre Venom/Morbius-without-Spider-Man universe. Perhaps the idea is that the maker of Spider Morbius is rarely the best choice for a Legend of Zelda movie.
The director in question, Wes Ball, is another odd choice. Ball hasn’t directed a film since 2018, when he finished his Maze Runner trilogy, an adaptation of a teen series when things like Divergent and The Hunger Games were all raging. These films were. . . Good, but it’s a little strange to see a director with little delight beyond this singular trilogy selected for a task as big as this. I was directing a (now cancelled) Mouse Guard movie, which has fancy art that would possibly give us an indication that yes, it can possibly capture the Zelda vibe, but we’ll see.
Then there’s the writer, who, according to Deadline, not Nintendo, was in charge of the script. That would be Derek Connolly, who wrote the last 3 Jurassic Park movies, Dominion, Fallen Kingdom, and World. He wrote the very clever script for Detective Pikachu, which is a built-in Nintendo connection. It turns out that he supposedly wrote a draft of Rise of Skywalker that wasn’t used. But again, it turns out to be a bit of an uncommon selection here.
Really, there’s nothing about any of those three—Avi Arad, Wes Ball, and Derek Connolly—that makes you jump out of your seat and start raving about their paintings in a live-action Zelda movie. Admittedly, this is uncharted territory as Zelda proves almost unsuitable for live-action in the first place, but it seems that Nintendo has selected unorthodox partners for the project.
However, it should not be forgotten that similar skepticism occurred when it was revealed that Illumination would make the Super Mario Bros. movie, from the studio “Minions”. The end result was. . . a pretty decent Mario movie that did what it needed to be. to make a billion dollars. And that’s probably the maximum possible for Zelda here. Probably, at best, a decent film that, again, will generate at most a billion dollars. This is Nintfinisho for you.
I have doubts about who was given the keys here, but now all eyes are on the cast of the central roles of Link and Zelda, as well as the story this movie ends up adapting, given all the possible options there are in the series. But I wouldn’t expect to hear anything about it for a while.
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