The Lands Between, for better or for worse, are coming to the silver screen: indie studio A24 has confirmed that it will be taking on the behemoth task of adapting Elden Ring, one of the biggest video games to date. Fans of the Soulsborne game have yet to decide whether this is a good thing or not.
Although the project looks impressive on paper — especially with Ex Machina and Annihilation director Alex Garland leading the charge to create the live-action movie — not every video game movie is a guaranteed success. Take, for instance, the 2016 debacle that was Warcraft, which tried (but failed) to do justice to the massively popular online role-playing game, World of Warcraft. The film is essentially a CGI-fueled trainwreck that juggles too many storylines and can’t decide whether it’s a serious social commentary on orc power struggles (huh??) or a campy (but not very funny) take on the beloved game. Bobby Kotick, former CEO at game studio Activision Blizzard, once described Warcraft as “one of the worst movies I’ve ever seen.”
The list of flops is long. Honorable mentions include the Silent Hill films, the doomed Doom movie, and whatever that botched Borderlands adaptation was supposed to be. But we would be remiss to ignore the string of projects that have stayed true to their source material. Think HBO’s The Last of Us, which so far has done a stellar, terrifying job of adapting the post-apocalyptic game series. Think the Jack Black-led Minecraft movie, which leaned so hard on the absurdity of making a Minecraft movie that Rolling Stone dubbed it the equivalent of the Rocky Horror Picture Show for Gen Alpha’s TikTok kids.
However, the fact remains: creating a video game adaptation can either spell success with a capital $, or instant failure. Elden Ring fans have already taken to the Internet to voice both their excitement and their misgivings about A24’s foray into video game blockbusters.
Do we already smell trouble in the Lands Between? Will the Tarnished make it to our cinemas? That isn’t for us to say: but as gamers and fans speculate over just how A24 will tackle their high-stakes (and first ever) video game adaptation, we’ve rounded up a few questions we’ve been sitting on about the upcoming Elden Ring movie.
How Will A24 Tackle All That Lore?
The beauty of Elden Ring is that it’s a sprawling, open world game, notorious for offering players with so many opportunities to explore that they end up logging hundreds of hours in an attempt to complete a “perfectionist” run of the game. One player, whose Steam handle is AERViANCE, holds the highest record of hours played, as of this writing: 27,189.
This isn’t to say that you can’t “complete” Elden Ring. In the main storyline, you play as a member of the Tarnished, soldiers who have lost grace with the divine Erdtree and were banished from the Lands Between by Queen Marika the Eternal (as I said, there’s a lot of lore, but we’ll be gentle). Throughout the game, you are tasked with restoring order by collecting Great Runes and working your way through slaying a list of demigods. But that’s where the linearity of Elden Ring ends. You’re meant to go on side quests, discover hidden tidbits of lore (which is how you’ll be able to piece together the real history behind the world), and if you actually make it to the end of the game, you have six endings to choose from.
So how does A24 plan to take all of this on? A24 could go the same route as Prime Studio’s adaptation Fallout, which steers away from tricky exposition and instead creates original characters inspired by the games. Fallout’s first season stayed true to the game’s retro-futuristic tones and themes of nuclear warfare, while still being able to play with fresh storylines that weren’t burdened by almost 30 years of dense lore.
It’s also important to note that A24 has never spawned a tentpole film franchise, much less a video game adaptation. The studio first rose to fame for releasing an array of irreverent comedies (Spring Breakers and The Bling Ring), poignant dramas (including Oscar-winning Moonlight, Lady Bird), and thought-provoking horrors (The Witch, Hereditary, and Midsommar). But it has since begun dipping its toes into creating films more streamlined for wider audiences. Everything Everywhere All At Once, an action sci-fi drama starring Michelle Yeoh, Ke Huy Quan, and Stephanie Hsu, swept the 95th Academy Awards, bringing home seven awards in total for the studio. Its 2024 historical drama, The Brutalist, bagged three Oscar wins, cementing A24’s place as a household name: not just in indie circles, but in mainstream cinema as well.
But can A24 take on major fantasy IPs like that of Elden Ring? While the studio has released fantasy films like The Legend of Ochi and The Green Knight, both of which were met with varying degrees of success, it has never tackled something as large as a video game adaptation. We’ll just have to wait and see if A24 can deliver something that truly does Elden Ring justice. That said, the studio isn’t slowing down: it’s also set to adapt Death Stranding, the genre-defying game from legendary Metal Gear creator, Hideo Kojima.
Is Alex Garland The Right Fit For the Job?
There is always this worry that the director leading a video game adaptation doesn’t truly understand what they’re signing up for. This disconnect between the filmmaker and the source material can often lead to disastrous results, as was the case with the 2003 game remake, House of the Dead. Director Uwe Boll, who spent most of the aughts making objectively bad video game adaptations, created a version of House of the Dead that was packed with inconsistent storylines and so much body horror that it barely resembled the game’s kooky, pixelated monsters. The film currently holds a 3 percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes.
But Garland seems to be a more than decent choice. Although the director has dabbled in the world of video games, having co-written the game script for Enslaved: Odyssey to the West, he is better known for helming successful sci-fi dramas, including Ex Machina, Annihilation, and 28 Days Later. He recently released Warfare, a harrowing war film starring Will Poulter and Cosmo Jarvis, and wrote the upcoming post-apocalyptic horror sequel 28 Years Later. (Note: Garland’s IMDb page does credit the director for being involved with creating the game DmC: Devil May Cry, but in Garland’s words, “I had fuck all to do with that.”)
Thankfully, Garland is a gamer boy himself, and is well versed in the lore of Elden Ring. In a Reddit Ask Me Anything session held in March, the director revealed that he’d been playing a lot of Shadow of the Erdtree, the 2024 expansion to the main game. Garland noted that he “couldn’t seem to stop playing.” Fans were relieved to find out that Garland isn’t approaching the project as an outsider, but as someone genuinely immersed in the lore.
