[COLUMN] I Regret to Inform You That I’m All-In on the Legend of Zelda Movie | by Marty Sliva (Patreon)

The first images from the upcoming film adaptation of The Legend of Zelda have been released by Nintendo, and I regret to inform you that I have decided to go all-in on this movie.

Dropped via the Nintendo Today app, we got our first official shots of Bo Bragason as Zelda and Benjamin Evan Ainsworth as Link. The former is dressed in blue, echoing her color palette from Breath of the Wild, while Link’s more traditional green tunic calls back to the likes of Ocarina of Time and Twilight Princess. We also get our first glimpse of Hyrule in the form of New Zealand, which if Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy taught us anything, makes for an excellent backdrop to your fantasy world.

Zelda is seen holding a bow with a quiver full of arrows on her back, perhaps pointing to a character who may take a more active role in the plot of the movie, as opposed to being relegated to the sidelines as a damsel in distress, which would be great. There were also some leaked set photos recently that showed what looks to be actress Dichen Lachman (best known as Ms. Casey on Severance), playing the role of some kind of mentor or guardian to Zelda, most likely Impa. 

All of this lends some credence to the theory that this movie won’t be a straight adaptation of one of the games, but rather a story that pulls elements and iconography from across multiple entries in the series. And for Zelda, this actually makes a lot of sense – I’m all for treating the story as a kind of monomyth that’s passed down through countless generations, glomming on to various elements along the way while still retaining the core spirit of what makes the games so special.

Not being forced to adhere to a single narrative would allow for a nice flexibility in the storytelling and production design. I could see them pulling inspiration for Hyrule from various games in the series – a mixture of the cozy-yet-melancholic Neverland of Ocarina’s Kokiri Village, the regal majesty of the Zora from Twilight Princess, the workers enclave of the Goron village from Breath of the Wild, etc.

For me, Zelda’s story throughout the years has always been less about direct plot points and narrative flow, and more about the vibes and raw sense of exploration that came from getting lost in its world. And I’m really hoping that’s something that director Wes Ball can tap into. Ball is best known for his work on the serviceable Maze Runner trilogy, but more recently (and more impressively), the genuinely good Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes. That one featured a sprawling landscape, long stretches without dialogue, and a lot of interactions between humans and critters. Sounds like a decent starting place for a Zelda movie.

By now some of you are probably already typing out comments about how this project should’ve been animated instead of live action, and honestly, I’m with you there. But that’s not the world we live in, so there’s no use dwelling on it. Also, if characters like Spider-Man taught us anything over the past 30 years, it’s that we can have several dozen incarnations of a hero across every medium imaginable, so please look forward to 2038’s Into the Zelda-Verse.

Really quick tangent, but as I mentioned above, these images first hit via the Nintendo Today app. For the 99% of you who don’t know what that is, it’s a kind of official Nintendo calendar app where they drop various bits of news, trivia, historical milestones, and random pieces of art and music every morning. It’s also one of the four (!) official Nintendo apps that I currently have installed on my phone, alongside Nintendo Music, the Nintendo Store, and the Nintendo Switch app. For the life of me, I cannot tell you why these aren’t just folded into one single app.

But yeah, when it comes to my growing hype for the Zelda movie, I really should know better by now. We’ve been down this road countless times before, and it almost always ends the same way. A Hollywood adaptation of a video game series that I love gets announced, some talented folks get attached both in front of and behind the camera, and then some images and brief video footage of the production begins to trickle out. And lo and behold, my hopes and dreams for said adaptation begin to inflate just enough, to the point where I start to think that maybe this will actually do justice to the source material that I hold in such high regard.

And then we get Resident Evil. And Silent Hill. And Prince of Persia. And Assassin’s Creed. And Uncharted. And Halo.

But in my defense, we’re also in a bit of a renaissance when it comes to these adaptations. On the streaming front, we have HBO’s The Last of Us, Amazon’s Fallout, Peacock’s Twisted Metal, and Netflix’s Arcane and Cyberpunk: Edgerunners. In theaters, this past decade or so has seen the solid Detective Pikachu, the charming Super Mario Bros. Movie, the serviceable A Minecraft Movie, and Ubisoft’s Werewolves Within, which is arguably the best video game adaptation of the bunch.

Which of those lists The Legend of Zelda will join remains to be seen, and we still have a ways to go before its May 7th, 2027 release date. In the meantime, Nintendo has The Super Mario Galaxy Movie, which is slated for a few months from now on April 3rd, 2026. We just got the first teaser for that as well, which introduced us to the excellent casting of Brie Larson as Rosalina and Benny Safdie as Bowser Jr., and finally proving my theory that Shigeru Miyamoto is a big Uncut Gems fan.