If there were any concern that Alex Garland isn’t an Elden Ring fanboy, we now have evidence that the movie director is as devoted to FromSoftware’s 2022 epic as the rest of us. In addition to playing the game several times through, he was apparently so eager to make a live-action Elden Ring film that he wrote up an entire script before anyone had signed off on it.
Tucked inside a New Yorker feature about A24’s rise in the film industry and its future ambitions is a small anecdote about how the upcoming Elden Ring movie was born. According to the story, A24 head of film Noah Sacco visited Garland and watched him play the game after the director “gushed” about it on the phone.
Impressed by the fantasy world and its similarities to Lord of the Rings, Sacco gave Garland a “fuck yeah” when he asked if A24 would work with him on it. And instead of bringing just the pitch alone to FromSoftware and Bandai Namco, Garland spun up a 160-page script (and 40 pages of imagery) to convince creator Hidetaka Miyazaki that he was serious about it.
Only a man who has played Elden Ring several times and thinks one of its toughest bosses is “quite easy” would endure a trial like that just to get FromSoft’s approval. Honestly, he sounds like me trying to talk each of my friends into trying Dark Souls. I’m not out here writing 160-page scripts, but I’m sure the DMs I send them would fill up a few pages.
It’s strangely fitting that despite not knowing what the Elden Ring movie will be about, we do know that its director is about as obsessed with it as the fans. Not that you need to be as a requirement, but it’s nice knowing a world as large and eccentric as Elden Ring’s seems to be in caring hands.
Garland’s previous films include Civil War, Ex Machina, and Annihilation. We first learned about plans for an Elden Ring movie earlier this year when it was rumored and then confirmed by Bandai Namco. George RR Martin, who helped build the Elden Ring world, is on board as a producer.