What is The Legend of Zelda? Adapting The Legend into a Two-Hour, Live-Action, Animated Film
Nintendo is making a live-action film adaption of The Legend of Zelda, which is a game franchise best known for it’s silent one-liners, an infinite repeating plot, and convoluted timelines that make it so difficult to understand. How do you adapt something like that into a two-hour film?
Can a live-action Zelda film compete with Mario’s popularity–or, more importantly, erase the black spot placed on the company’s name by the original live-action Mario movie? Maybe. If not, there’s already a great, Zelda-esque live-action film you can comfort yourself with right now: Ridley Scott’s 1985 film Legend, a glitter-bombed fever dream where Tom Cruise hangs out with fairies in a teeny little tunic, and Tim Curry plays the devil. Perfection.
The Legend of Zelda: What makes a Nintendo movie really good? The Nintendo Movie has been wildly successful in the Super Mario Bros. Franchise
Personally, I’m not a fan of assuming that just because a piece of art is based on preexisting IP, it must be bad. I believe it to be a compelling challenge. Artists constantly find themselves positioned against overwhelming entities driven by accumulating power, yet they still find the courage to create anyway and, with a little wisdom, outsmart the systems they work within that want to consume everything. It’s how we get some of the best art we know.
All of that is the most head-in-ass, pretentious way to introduce a simple question: What would make a Legend of Zelda movie actually good? … Alan, this is absurd, cut all this.
Link is a twink of action. He is communication with his actions. If somebody tells Link that they have been overrun by ruffians, he just goes off and rebuilds the entire village with his comically OP Zonai cannon spear. Who needs to talk when you can do that?
I will try to take it further, but no further argument is needed. The three main characters of the series have been represented by the three powers of the Triforce: Courage, Wisdom, and Power.
One of the most popular Nintendo games is The Legend of Zelda, a silent, twinky hero named Link battles villains with the assistance of a princess. The first game in the series was made in 1986 and has been included in dozens more games over the years. The franchise is one of Nintendo’s heavy hitters, a series where each game is highly anticipated and commonly commercially successful. Since May, the book has sold more than 20 million copies.
Nintendo decided to invest in a film adaptation of the series to make it more accessible to a wider audience. Earlier this year, the company hit gold with The Super Mario Bros. Movie, which eventually surpassed Frozen as the second-highest-grossing animated movie of all time. Beautifully animated, packed with stars like Chris Pratt and Jack Black, and an incredibly appealing commercial for the developer’s games, the Mario movie proved that, alongside darker fare like The Last of Us, adaptations of video game franchises aren’t the worst idea in the world.
The video game industry has been going big on film and TV projects for years, churning out projects that are either bad (Silent Hill, Resident Evil, Assassin’s Creed, I could go on), very bad (BloodRayne, 1993’s Super Mario Bros., Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time), or surprisingly great (The Last of Us, Sonic the Hedgehog, Detective Pikachu). Audiences have consistently turned out for video game adaptations despite a long history of failures.