Is Nintendo falling into a trap with the Zelda movie? (pic: Nintendo)
A reader is worried that now Nintendo is financing its own films it’s putting itself at serious risk if the newly announced Zelda movie fails.
It’s been a pretty amazing year for Nintendo, with two all-time classics under their belt, with Zelda: Tears Of The Kingdom and Super Mario Bros. Wonder, plus a lot of other really good smaller games like Pikmin 4 and Advance Wars 1+2. The Super Mario Bros. Movie was also huge and while I don’t think it was very good, at the time I was happy to see it was successful, as it meant more money and security for Nintendo… and even less chance of Microsoft being able to buy them.
But this week they did the inevitable and announced a Zelda movie as well. Not an animated one, in the same style as Mario, but a live action movie. We know very little about it at this stage and yet everything we do know sounds awful.
What concerns me the most is that Nintendo is putting their own money into it and so, unlike the Mario movie, they stand to lose a lot of money if it’s a failure. And, as GC has already pointed out, that’s already what nearly killed Square, when they tried to make their Final Fantasy movie.
The movie business a lot more fickle than video games and one of my main concerns is that Nintendo doesn’t really understand it all that well. And why would they? That’s not their business; it doesn’t work anything like games and they’ve little real experience with it. Also, Shigeru Miyamoto, who is the Nintendo exec most involved with the films famously dislikes storytelling and seems to be the one responsible for the Mario movie having very little plot or characterisation.
He may be the greatest video game developer of all time, but I don’t think he’s a very good movie producer. Even just going by the people he surrounds himself with, he hasn’t tried to seek out someone like Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, who made the Lego movies and Into The Spider-Verse, and instead he’s gone with the ultra bland Illumination boss, whose name I can’t even remember, and Avi Arad – the man behind all the worst decisions to do with Marvel.
On top of that, Miyamoto’s choice for director is the guy who’s only ever made the Maze Runner, while the writer has a track record for artless trash like Jurassic World, Monster Trucks, and The Rise Of Skywalker. It’s like if he was making a new Zelda game and he got the people behind Forspoken to make it.
And all this is before we even get to the fundamental problem that Zelda does not suit being turned into a movie. People probably said that about Mario as well but the one benefit there is that there’s so little story it was almost a blank slate, beyond the surface details. With Zelda though there is some lore, just not much of it. Once that gets overcomplicated and blandified it’s going to seem horribly generic as a movie.
The bigger problem though is that neither Link or Zelda has any real personality. Even in the last two games Zelda has been a huge wet blanket, with almost no agency and constantly whining and complaining. At least Peach gets to be playable in some of the games she’s in, but Zelda never is in any meaningful way, apart from a couple of final boss battles.
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Link’s even more of a non-character, except with him it’s not a failure – that’s the way he’s designed. He doesn’t talk, he has no personality, and it’s purposefully that way so that you can project yourself onto him, so that in your version of playing the game he acts however you think he should. That’s great for a game, it’s not going to work with a movie – unless Nintendo do some sort of avant-garde silent movie, which I think we can guarantee they’re not going to.
Zelda is the best video game series of all time, but I do not see any way that it would make a good film. And no, it’s not worth just waiting and seeing how it turns out. If Nintendo put all their money into this and it flops then they’re suddenly very vulnerable to a takeover. I’m sure that will please Microsoft but not me and the millions of other Zelda fans around the world.
By Terry Gold
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A reader is worried that now Nintendo is financing its own films it’s putting itself at serious risk if the newly announced Zelda movie fails.
