Following the billion-dollar success of The Super Mario Bros Movie this summer, Nintendo has since announced that a live-action Legend of Zelda movie is now in the works at Sony Pictures.
Maze Runner and Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes director Wes Ball will helm the blockbuster based on the high fantasy video game series.
Each outing is set in the Kingdom of Hyrule where you play as a young elf-life adventurer called Link, who goes on a quest to save Princess Zelda and her domain from the villainous Ganondorf.
Speaking with Entertainment Weekly, the filmmaker teased: “This awesome fantasy-adventure movie that isn’t like Lord of the Rings, it’s its own thing.
“I’ve always said, I would love to see a live-action Miyazaki. That wonder and whimsy that he brings to things, I would love to see something like that.”
Ball was referring to Studio Ghibli director Hayao Miyazaki, whose latest Japanese anime movie The Boy and the Heron hits cinemas this month.
The director continued: “It’s going to be awesome. My whole life has led up to this moment. I grew up on Zelda and it is the most important property, I think, that’s untapped IP, if you will. So we very much are working hard to do something. We’re not just trying to do it because we can. We want to make something really special.”
Some fans were surprised by the news that the Zelda movie will be live-action given that The Super Mario Bros Movie was successful as a CGI-animation, while its original live-action outing was a box office bomb. However, there’s speculation that Ball could end up shooting a motion capture movie in the style of Avatar after one of his old tweets was unearthed.
The tweet read: “Since I could never even hope to have the chance to direct it… the next big mo-cap Avatar-like movie should be… THE LEGEND OF ZELDA.”
Ball, who is working on the Zelda movie script, said of the tweet: “Someone dug it up and they put it out there. I was like, oh yeah, cool, that makes sense. James Cameron’s one of the guys I look up to in terms of movies. He’s able to do big, giant spectacle, but he’s still able to ground his stories in a way that is very relatable to broad audiences.
“Avatar inspired me to ultimately make my little short ‘Ruin’ that got me on to the Fox people, and they gave me the Maze Runner movies. From there it went to Planet of the Apes and ultimately to Zelda.”