Elden Ring had a spectacular release with over 30 million copies of the video game being sold since it was released in 2022, but now the world of the game is headed for a very different format. Elden Ring’s Souls-like video game proved immensely popular upon release, winning multiple Game of the Year awards, and getting shout-outs from celebrities who shared their own progress in the game.
However, despite selling 30 million copies, the nature of this incredible story, which was directed by Hidetaka Miyazaki with additional story-building elements from Game of Thrones creator, George R.R. Martin, being a video game automatically excludes anyone who doesn’t play video games from experiencing the story.
Thankfully, that is all due to change, because Alex Garland, the writer and director of incredible projects like Ex Machina and Civil War, who has himself completed the Elden Ring game no less than six times, is set to direct a major feature film in association with A24, with both Miyazaki and Martin joining the team to build out the story.
Making A Live-Action Elden Ring Movie Is A Huge Undertaking
Elden Ring has already begun its life as an ambitious game, with a typical playthrough taking anywhere between 40 hours for a focused story-driven playthrough, to 130+ hours for a blind playthrough. But realistically, even after completing the game, many players go back to experiencing the game in a new way, either by selecting a different starting class, or mixing up the way you progress through the story.
With that in mind, condensing all of this down to a movie that spans somewhere between 90 minutes and 3 hours will be an enormous challenge, because there is literally no way in which anyone could cram more than a small fraction of the contents of the game into a film.
That being said, there is potential for this story to kick off what could be the first major franchise to come out of A24, with a series of movies being made to explore different parts of the world of the game. And if that doesn’t happen, hopefully the creatives working on the project can distill it down to some of the most pivotal parts to deliver something worthy of being called an Elden Ring adaptation.
The Elden Ring Movie Is In Good Hands With Alex Garland
As mentioned above, Alex Garland, who is both writing and directing the film, is an avid fan who has put hundreds of hours into playing it for himself. And as a successful writer-director who has a growing list of widely celebrated films under his belt, from his early hits such as Ex Machina to the more recent collaborations with Danny Boyle in the 28 Years trilogy, Garland is clearly a gifted filmmaker.
And not only will Garland be working on the most pivotal aspects of this film in the role of writer-director, but he is also being guided by the original creative geniuses, Miyazaki and Martin, to accurately bring this dark world to the big screen.
With that creative team working together, it seems like a certainty that the Elden Ring movie will have the very best chance at being an authentic, faithful, and compelling retelling of the story in a whole new format. Of course, there will be compromises, and things will need to be altered in important ways to fit this new method of storytelling, but there are parts of the larger story that could lend themselves beautifully to being adapted.
Whatever the outcome, March 3, 2028, will mark a new era in the series, and potentially set the course for the future of the Elden Ring video game series on a global scale, as a whole new audience gets to experience the imagination and creativity of the game in a whole new way.
- Release Date
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March 3, 2028
- Producers
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Allon Reich, Andrew Macdonald, George R. R. Martin, Vince Gerardis, Matthew Penry-Davey
