A few weeks ago, a report popped up suggesting 28 Days Later scribe, and Ex Machina director Alex Garland would be helming an Elden Ring movie for cinema darlings A24 (which is also making a Death Stranding film). Any talk of that being real quickly fizzled out, and at the time, it seemed fair to assume it was a baseless bit of gossip because how does that combination of things give us an Elden Ring movie worthy of the multi-stranded saga contained within FromSoftware’s juggernaut action RPG?
But yesterday, that report was confirmed to be true. Alex Garland and A24 are, in fact, making an Elden Ring feature film. So, with that now a reality, can it work?
The reasons it shouldn’t are understandable. The widest scope of FromSoftware’s Souls games is found in Elden Ring. After the tight structure of previous games that pushed minimalist storytelling in the right direction, Elden Ring is perhaps overstuffed with lore, probably a key reason Game of Thrones author George R. R. Martin was involved in the world-building.
Having that much background detail in an open-world video game that you can spend hundreds of hours in makes the world richer. But condensing it into something that lasts at most three hours is like trying to drop an aircraft carrier into a swimming pool.
The second point is true of most video game adaptations. Your investment in the world, the grand spectacle of it, is tied into a crucial, unique aspect of the medium; you are in that world, physically interacting with it. You cannot replicate the intensity of titanic clashes or the unbridled joy of discovery that the video game version brings.
Elden Ring Movie: Adapting an Epic
But this is not about being outright dismissive of an Elden Ring movie. What I’m saying is obvious: you can’t go toe-to-toe with the source, but that doesn’t mean you can’t adapt that world differently. As I mentioned before, Elden Ring’s story is unwieldy for a movie, but the game can still be viewed as a snapshot. You can skim the surface of the backstory and, thanks to the visual side of things, still get a genuine appreciation for the state of The Lands Between.
Cinema’s strength is, and always has been, visual. Garland has a good track record in that regard. I can’t say I’m sure about him helming a fantasy movie, even if he’s handled intense, brooding sci-fi in Ex Machina and Annihilation. Something is exciting about Garland stepping into a challenging new arena, and given that he’s also a well-respected writer, I think it’s possible he could approach an Elden Ring movie with the knowledge of what he shouldn’t try and make.
The easiest solution I can think of is taking a particular thread of Elden Ring’s story and making that a focus. What it definitely needs is The Lands Between, but a Tarnished is not necessarily required as the focal point. What the game does give us is a host of striking characters with well-written, tragic backstories. Choosing to focus on any one of them would be a more compelling framework for a film adaptation than any foolish attempt to tackle the epic scope of the game’s overarching story. That would do nothing for the characters.
So that would just leave the question of which character to focus an Elden Ring movie on. Radhan? Miquella? Malenia? A buddy comedy about the Godskin Duo? The cynic in me would suggest the franchise potential is enormous, but most importantly, this method would give us a great flavor of the game without stumbling in an attempt to replicate it.
