Alex Garland wrote the screenplay before he had the job, then flew to Japan to sell his vision to the game’s creator. Now A24 is reportedly making its biggest movie ever, and the Lands Between are heading to IMAX.
Alex Garland (Ex Machina, Civil War) wanted to make an Elden Ring movie so badly that he wrote the screenplay before anyone asked him to.
Think about that. Not an outline. Not a treatment scribbled between meetings. The guy sat down, developed a 160-page screenplay with another 40 pages of imagery, and then took a trip to Japan to pitch the whole thing to the man who created the game.
I’ll take “obsessed gamers and directors” for $500, please?
According to The New Yorker, Garland traveled with A24 executive Noah Sacco to present his vision to Hidetaka Miyazaki, the director behind FromSoftware’s Elden Ring.
Garland loves gaming. In fact, he had already played Elden Ring repeatedly. In an IGN interview, he discussed reaching his seventh playthrough and offered an opinion guaranteed to start an argument among gamers.
“Radahn’s really easy,” the director said.
Somewhere, a Tarnished who spent three evenings getting flattened by Starscourge Radahn just threw a controller across the room.
But Garland’s enthusiasm is more than an amusing bit of gamer credibility. It explains why this adaptation might differ from Hollywood’s long tradition of purchasing popular game titles and hoping that recognizable characters will compensate for an indifferent screenplay.
Garland went looking for the movie. He already had a story he wanted to tell.
Now A24 is reportedly spending nearly $200 million to help him tell it.
That’s almost three times the approximately $70 million production budget of the studio’s previous record holder, Marty Supreme, starring Timothée Chalamet (Dune, Wonka). At those prices, the courtside Knicks appearances with Kylie Jenner must have come with complimentary helicopter service.
The reported Elden Ring figure, attributed to The Wall Street Journal, hasn’t been officially confirmed by A24. Even so, the scale is remarkable for a studio that built its reputation on comparatively modest, filmmaker-driven productions.
Add George R. R. Martin (A Song of Ice and Fire, Game of Thrones) as a producer, a formidable cast, and a March 3, 2028 theatrical release filmed for IMAX, and the Lands Between suddenly look like one of Hollywood’s most intriguing destinations.
Garland has an entire mythology at his disposal, millions of players who know its secrets, and a reported $200 million to bring it to life. Somehow, he still has to make audiences feel that delicious uncertainty of stepping into the Lands Between for the first time.
Garland’s Seven Playthroughs Could Matter More Than His Filmography
Garland’s credentials are impressive enough without the gaming obsession.
- He wrote 28 Days Later, helping reinvigorate zombie horror with deserted streets, furious infected creatures, and an atmosphere of constant dread.
- His directorial debut, Ex Machina, examined artificial intelligence through a story that gradually led its characters—and the audience—to question who was manipulating whom.
- Then came Annihilation, a haunting journey into an environment where nature behaves according to rules nobody understands.
- If you weren’t bored of Alex Garland yet, he gave us Civil War, which had everyone in America thinking twice about gas prices and sharing privacy rights with our friends in the military.
Alex Garland’s films share something with Elden Ring: Discovery is often accompanied by the creeping suspicion that discovering anything was a terrible idea.
For readers unfamiliar with the game, Elden Ring is a 2022 action role-playing adventure in which players control a Tarnished, an exile summoned back to the Lands Between after the destruction of the Elden Ring shattered the realm’s divine order.
The journey involves exploring an enormous open world, confronting demigods, gathering Great Runes, and pursuing the title of Elden Lord. Along the way, players uncover fragments of history through encounters, ruined buildings, and descriptions attached to seemingly ordinary objects.
It’s a world that expects its visitors to pay attention. You know? Unlike the one we’re in at the moment.
A cave might lead to an underground civilization. An unassuming stranger could send a player into a quest lasting dozens of hours. A beautiful landscape might contain a monster capable of ending an adventure before anyone remembers which button activates the shield.
Garland told IGN he reached his seventh playthrough of Elden Ring. For a game notorious for punishing even experienced players, that kind of commitment says something about the filmmaker trying to bring it to theaters.
Plenty of filmmakers could reproduce the game’s armor, weapons, and enormous bosses. The harder task is capturing the sensation of entering an unfamiliar place and realizing its history extends far beyond anything the audience has been told.
That takes more than expensive visual effects. It takes a filmmaker willing to let mystery remain mysterious.
George R. R. Martin’s Elden Ring Lore Gives Garland a World Already Broken
That’s George R. R. – By God – Martin, who didn’t simply lend his famous name to Elden Ring.
The author whose novels inspired HBO’s Game of Thrones helped develop the game’s foundational mythology. Hidetaka Miyazaki (Dark Souls, Bloodborne) and FromSoftware then transformed that material into the world players encounter.
Martin’s fingerprints are easy to recognize.
Queen Marika presides over a complicated divine order. Her descendants and their rivals struggle for power. Family relationships become political catastrophes, and a conflict known as the Shattering leaves the Lands Between in ruins.
Anyone who survived eight seasons of Game of Thrones knows Martin has a particular gift for writing about families that should probably stop gathering for dinner. What makes Elden Ring unusual is that players arrive after the great disaster.
The war has already happened. The alliances have fractured. The survivors offer contradictory explanations of events, assuming they’re inclined to explain anything at all.
Ranni the Witch leads players toward the mysterious Eternal City of Nokron. Malenia, Blade of Miquella, has become one of gaming’s most feared adversaries. Radahn’s history carries its own tragedy, although players preoccupied with surviving his attacks may not immediately appreciate the finer points.
The game has sold more than 30 million copies worldwide, according to publisher Bandai Namco Entertainment.
Martin’s involvement as a film producer offers continuity with that mythology, but it doesn’t reveal what Garland intends to adapt. No official synopsis has confirmed whether the film follows the Tarnished’s central quest, explores the Shattering, or tells another story within the Lands Between.
There’s enough material for any of those approaches. And there’s something wonderfully appropriate about Martin helping bring another elaborate fantasy world to the screen while readers continue waiting for The Winds of Winter.
Westeros has been checking the mailbox for quite some time, George.
Why A24 Is Betting Blockbuster Money on Elden Ring
A24 has built a distinctive identity around filmmaker-driven projects, including Everything Everywhere All at Once, Hereditary, and Garland’s own Ex Machina.
An Elden Ring production approaching $200 million would represent a dramatic escalation in financial risk. It’s also easy to imagine where the money might go.
The Lands Between contain towering fortresses, subterranean cities, ruined temples, grotesque creatures, and landscapes that seem to have been designed during a fever dream involving medieval architecture and several competing religions.
Above much of it rises the Erdtree, an enormous golden presence that has become one of the game’s defining images. Translating that environment into a convincing theatrical experience requires more than placing a glowing tree behind a few actors.
Consider the contrast between Limgrave’s deceptively welcoming fields and Caelid’s diseased, scarlet landscape. Or the first discovery of Siofra River, where an underground region opens beneath an astonishing artificial sky.
These places aren’t interchangeable fantasy backdrops. Their appearances communicate the world’s history, its corruption, and the powers that shaped it.
Bandai Namco has confirmed that the movie is being filmed for IMAX, suggesting Garland wants those environments to overwhelm audiences in the best possible way. But the economics are less forgiving than a Site of Grace.
A production budget doesn’t include every marketing and distribution expense, and studios don’t receive every dollar spent at the box office. If the reported figure proves accurate, Elden Ring will need a substantial theatrical audience.
Its enormous player base provides a promising foundation. Reaching moviegoers who have never explored the Lands Between will be the bigger challenge.
Kit Connor, Cailee Spaeny, and the Mystery of Elden Ring’s Cast
The announced ensemble gives Garland plenty of acting talent, although the character assignments remain one of the production’s most carefully guarded secrets.
- According to Bandai Namco’s official cast announcement, the film features Kit Connor (Heartstopper, Warfare), Cailee Spaeny (Priscilla, Alien: Romulus), and Ben Whishaw (Skyfall, Paddington).
- Also announced are Tom Burke (Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, The Souvenir), Havana Rose Liu (Bottoms, No Exit), Sonoya Mizuno (Ex Machina, House of the Dragon), and Jonathan Pryce (The Two Popes, Game of Thrones).
- The ensemble also includes Ruby Cruz (Willow, Bottoms), Nick Offerman (Parks and Recreation, The Last of Us), John Hodgkinson (The Favourite, The Last Kingdom), Jefferson Hall (House of the Dragon, Halloween), Emma Laird (Mayor of Kingstown, The Brutalist), and Peter Serafinowicz (Guardians of the Galaxy, The Tick).
That’s 13 performers with backgrounds spanning prestige drama, horror, fantasy, comedy, and action. The range should give Garland considerable flexibility when building a cinematic story around the game’s mythology.
Mizuno’s previous collaboration with Garland is particularly interesting, while Offerman has already demonstrated how much emotional weight a performer can bring to a video-game adaptation.
Serafinowicz’s distinctive voice would seem perfectly suited to a world where nearly everyone speaks as though delivering the final warning before a terrible curse. But the speculation needs to remain speculation.
No official announcement identifies Connor as the Tarnished, Pryce as an ancient ruler, or any other performer as a particular Elden Ring character. That uncertainty leaves fans free to imagine who might portray Ranni, Melina, Godfrey, or the many other figures whose histories are scattered throughout the game.
It also raises an interesting possibility: Garland may not be telling precisely the story players expect. For a game built around discovering what lies beyond the next hill, keeping a few secrets seems entirely appropriate.
From Mortal Kombat to Mario, Hollywood Finally Understands Gaming’s Box Office
Video game movies haven’t always enjoyed the respect their source material deserves.
- The 1993 Super Mario Bros. movie transformed Nintendo’s cheerful Mushroom Kingdom into a dystopian fever dream. Street Fighter (1994) gave audiences Raul Julia (The Addams Family, Kiss of the Spider Woman) as the magnificently theatrical M. Bison. However, the rest of the movie struggled to match his enthusiasm.
- Mortal Kombat (1995) understood its assignment considerably better. It offered martial arts, supernatural combat, outrageous characters, and music that could make an entire theater feel ready to challenge Shang Tsung.
- The Resident Evil movies subsequently proved that video game adaptations could become enduring theatrical franchises, even when their storytelling strayed from the original games.
But the modern box-office results have changed the conversation.
- Universal and Nintendo’s The Super Mario Bros. Movie earned approximately $1.36 billion worldwide in 2023.
- Warner Bros.’ A Minecraft Movie approached $960 million in 2025
- While Paramount‘s Sonic the Hedgehog 3 earned nearly $490 million.
Those movies didn’t succeed by pretending their gaming origins were embarrassing. They embraced the worlds and characters audiences already loved while making them accessible to newcomers.
HBO’s The Last of Us demonstrated another approach, translating a deeply emotional game narrative into prestige television. Yet Elden Ring poses a problem none of those adaptations faced in quite the same way.
Mario and Sonic have established personalities. Joel and Ellie arrive with a carefully structured story. The Tarnished is largely a vessel for the player’s choices, while the game’s mythology must be assembled from fragments.
Garland will need to give that journey a cinematic center without flattening the mysteries that make it compelling. It’s the difference between making a movie about Elden Ring and making a movie that actually feels like Elden Ring.
Zelda in 2027 and Elden Ring in 2028 Could Change Fantasy Gaming Movies
Another beloved fantasy world will reach theaters before Garland’s film.
Nintendo and Sony Pictures’ live-action The Legend of Zelda, directed by Wes Ball (The Maze Runner, Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes), is scheduled for April 30, 2027.
That places Hyrule on the big screen less than a year before the Lands Between arrive in IMAX. Both properties celebrate exploration, ancient mysteries, and heroic journeys, but they approach fantasy from very different directions.
Zelda generally embraces the recognizable traditions of courage, destiny, and the struggle against darkness. Elden Ring takes many of those familiar ingredients and twists them into a mythology in which gods, heroes, and monsters rarely fit comfortably into categories.
The comparison recalls Peter Jackson (The Lord of the Rings, King Kong) and his Lord of the Rings trilogy, which demonstrated that audiences would embrace sprawling fantasy worlds when filmmakers treated them as places with believable histories.
Jackson’s Middle-earth felt inhabited long before the Fellowship began its journey. Garland needs to achieve something similar, but he faces an additional challenge. Millions of players already have deeply personal memories of the Lands Between.
Some remember discovering Nokron. Others recall their first glimpse of Stormveil Castle. Plenty are still haunted by the Tree Sentinel, who taught new players that a beautiful horse and a shiny weapon don’t necessarily mean they’re ready for a fight.
A film cannot reproduce the freedom of making those discoveries independently. It can, however, give audiences a different perspective on places they thought they knew.
That opportunity extends beyond Elden Ring. As studios pursue more ambitious gaming adaptations, filmmakers will increasingly need to understand what makes these interactive worlds meaningful before trying to adapt them into conventional screen stories.
Elden Ring’s Real Boss Fight Is Turning Player Discovery Into a Movie
The reported $200 million budget makes for an irresistible headline. Martin’s involvement, the cast, and the IMAX plans only add to the anticipation.
But the most encouraging detail remains the one that started this whole adventure. Garland wrote the screenplay before he had the job.
That doesn’t guarantee the movie will work. Plenty of passionate filmmakers have made expensive disappointments, and no amount of familiarity with Radahn can solve a weak third act.
What it suggests is that Garland approached Elden Ring with a specific creative idea rather than merely recognizing a profitable brand. The game is famous for making players work to understand its world. Every discovery feels earned because curiosity carries risks, and the journey rarely unfolds as expected.
A film must choose a story, follow characters, and eventually provide some measure of resolution. Garland can’t hand audiences a controller and tell them to investigate the ruins themselves.
He can make them curious about those ruins.
If the movie succeeds, it won’t be because every boss, weapon, and hidden location appears on screen. It will be because the Lands Between feel as mysterious, dangerous, and magnificent as players remember, while offering a compelling story to people encountering that world for the first time.
March 3, 2028 is still a long way off.
Then again, Garland has already spent seven playthroughs preparing for the journey. Considering what the Lands Between usually does to first-time visitors, that sounds like a reasonable head start.
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