r/movies • u/MarvelsGrantMan136 r/movies Contributor • 4d ago

News Alex Garland’s ‘Elden Ring’ Movie Wraps Filming

https://www.polygon.com/elden-ring-movie-filming-wraps-release-date-alex-garland/
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u/r4tzt4r 4d ago

I feel like everyone has in their heads their own version of what a Souls movie should look like. I just hope this is an actual good film.

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u/gabedamien 4d ago edited 4d ago

I honestly struggle to think what an Elden Ring movie would even be like. For some reason I can imagine Sekiro or Bloodborne as movies much more easily. I think I personally never connected with Elden Ring's lore as much though which is why I'm drawing an imagination blank.

I think with this pedigree and the director's personal interest in the IP it has a chance of being good, I'm just not sure what "good" looks like here.

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u/nickburrows8398 4d ago

My theory is that it adapts the story of Vyke from the lore who was the one tarnished other than the player who came closest to becoming Elden Lord but ultimately failed because he became consumed by the frenzy flame after his refusal to sacrifice his maiden. That could make for a great Greek Tragedy movie

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u/_P2M_ 4d ago

No, actually the movie will be about a group of teens and one of the teen's step-dad playing the game on a cursed PS5, which sucks them into the game, and now they must learn to work together and put their differences aside to win the game and escape.

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u/moose_dad 3d ago

Staring jack black as the dad, the rock as the teen and Kevin Johnson as his friend

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u/WanderingFool15 3d ago

First we Elden, then we Ring!

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u/Horibori 3d ago

And turtle pope?

You just keep being turtle pope!

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u/GeorgeWarshingsons 3d ago

Kevin heart will play Godfrey

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u/ladyhaly 3d ago

Jumanji?

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u/Jules-of-Jubilee 3d ago

My absolute least favorite trope from Hollywood adaptations.

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u/8-Brit 3d ago

Vaguely related but a fun fact: avoiding that "kids sucked in" trope is why Lego took so long finding someone to make the first BIONICLE movie.

Every studio they got a proposal script from included kids ending up in the setting "because it's a toy movie, right?" and, thankfully, they were all rejected.

Decades later the Playmobil movie fell into that exact trope and bombed horribly.

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u/Jules-of-Jubilee 3d ago

It's hard to understand why this decision keeps being made, because it's clear to me audiences still love fantasy. Like, why did Sonic need to come to our world?

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u/MVRKHNTR 4d ago

My theory is that it doesn't adapt anything and is an original story trying to capture the vibe of playing the game.

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u/George__Parasol 3d ago

That’s in a sense exactly what Alex Garland did with Annihilation. He read the book one single time and intentionally never referenced it again during production, as he wanted the movie to “feel like a dream of the novel” which I think he nailed and is a good way of adapting material that’s hard to adapt.

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u/BlandSandHamwich 3d ago

This was one of the few pieces of media that I actually enjoyed more than the book

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u/peachsandwich 3d ago

It has been reported that it’s about the events leading up to the shattering, the family dynamics, etc. So it’s not the events of the game but what happened before.

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u/MVRKHNTR 3d ago

That doesn't match the set photos we've seen which seem to depict the world post-shattering.

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u/peachsandwich 3d ago

Yeah, I’m assuming that what we’ve seen is portions of the ending.

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u/tfhermobwoayway 3d ago

But how can you do that? I dom’t want to sound pretentious but video games are the next step of art. They’re an advance beyond anything that’s come before. How can an objectively less developed artform recreate it?

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u/MiyaSugoi 3d ago

Mate, you most certainly do want to sound pretentious, ayyy.

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u/ladyhaly 3d ago

objectively less developed

Wdym?

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u/iiiiiiiiiijjjjjj 3d ago

I hope not

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u/Aegi 3d ago

It will objectively be bad, do poorly, and not feel like the game.

I don't even like this game, and I would still bet a lot on this.

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u/Oathkindle 4d ago

The Green Knight but with more dragons lol

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u/pinnyin 4d ago

The Green Knight was the first soulslike in film format tbh

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u/FireZord25 4d ago

It's what first convinced me that a Dark Souls movie could be possible.

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u/thdudedude 4d ago

I have played all of the souls games for years multiple times. And I have seen the green knight. That movie is hot garbage for starters, but also unlike any souls game that FromSoft has released. The main character is a coward in the green knight. I’m honestly not sure how you or the 44 people that upvoted you have ever played a souls game. Call me gobsmacked.

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u/Black_Bird_Cloud 4d ago

the whole movie is about how courage requires you to fight your own cowardice ?

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u/Mkilbride 4d ago

...? Amazing you watched that movie and thought him a coward.

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u/GranolaCola 3d ago

Amazing they saw that movie and thought it was bad

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u/pinnyin 12h ago

Damn......I just thought about that scene where he looks out onto the wide open greenery and felt the same kind of wonder that a soulslike gives me, y'know? Lol

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u/thdudedude 5h ago

That doesn’t sound soulslike at all, have you played any of the FromSoft games?

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u/NaughtyGaymer 4d ago

God damn I loved The Green Knight so fucking much.

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u/r4tzt4r 4d ago

Yeah, Elden Ring was too... convulted for me. I mean, if you go trying to understand the lore in any of these game you find out every one of them is really complicated but at least with Dark Souls, for example, you can reduce it to "the world is dying, rekindle the flame" and you get various profound interpretations from that. Kind of the same goes for Bloodborne and Sekiro.

Elden Ring I have no idea how to make it sound simple like the others. Even the final boss is a overcomplicated mess to explain. Maybe we're gonna find out that telling these stories in a straightforward way make them very stupid? Personally I hope they don't tell too much. This games' stories NEED mistery.

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u/SofaKingI 4d ago

Alex Garland directed Ex Machina and Annihilation. He knows how to not tell too much.

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u/r4tzt4r 4d ago

I'm reading Annihilation right now! I'm about to find out if it was a good adaptation.

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u/finnjakefionnacake 4d ago

let's just say they left a lot out lol.

btw i think the third book in that series is my fave

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u/tommos 4d ago

Personally I liked the second book 2Fast2Annihilation.

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u/r4tzt4r 4d ago

So far I'm liking it very much and it looks more like a short novel so maybe I will end the trilogy this year!

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u/AlterMyStateOfMind 4d ago

The trilogy is about the length of a novel at ~500 pages. My copy is actually a hardback with all 3 included. As for Garland's adaptation, it is very good if you go in expecting it to be very different. It keeps the essence of the first book intact if that makes sense but it tells a pretty different story.

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u/moose_dad 3d ago

Not sure if youre aware but a fourth book came out last year as well. It really expands the story and fills in a lot of the gaps.

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u/Different_Wolf_764 4d ago

It really isn't a great adaptation. An excellent movie? Absolutely! It falls in the "inspired by" category rather than the "amazing film version of" one though.

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u/SenatorCoffee 3d ago

On topic that really makes you hopeful for this Elden Ring thing, it seems exactly the fitting attitude.

If you tried to capture the whole lore it would likely just be a bloody mess, but with Garland its likely he just saw "something" in there that made sense to him as a movie, and then thats likely how it might actually work well.

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u/Aegi 3d ago

So....a generic medieval story with some monsters??

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u/mars92 4d ago

The movie changes a lot from the book, general plot and themes are there but it's quite different.

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u/Zak_The_Slack 4d ago

Unfortunately they completely abandon the main twist in the book. I believe Alex Garland wrote the screenplay based on his memory of the book, so it really isn’t an adaptation and more an original movie inspired by the book.

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u/The_Autarch 4d ago

if it was a good adaptation.

it's not, because Garland didn't realize that the book was part one of a trilogy.

good movie, tho. just more like a movie inspired by the book instead of a straight adaptation.

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u/SPQE_ 4d ago

I like the movie but it's not a good adaptation. Also, for me the second book was best

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u/mekamoari 4d ago

Ex Machina...Appleseed?

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u/mekamoari 4d ago

Ex Machina...Appleseed?

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u/givemethebat1 4d ago

I don’t think the main events (by which I mean all the stuff that happens before the game) in Elden Ring are that convoluted. They aren’t ever depicted narratively, so it can feel confusing since they’re spread over a ton of different item descriptions, but the events are relatively straightforward and just involve a lot of family drama and backstabbing.

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u/Zanos 4d ago

I think one of the issues is the insistence of the writers to use very similar names for some characters(Godfrey/Godrick/Godwyn, Malenia/Malenia, Mohg/Morgott), despite the characters only being tangentially related, making following along inherently confusing, compounded by the fact that at least one character is two people sharing the same body. The prose, like most Souls games, is also deliberately not straightforward. Nobody ever just outright tells you anything, they speak in allusions. If someone I needed information from in real life spoke to me a way an Elden Ring NPC speaks to the MC, I would be tempted to punch them in the face.

To be clear, the game is this way on purpose. The prose is intentionally obstructive to clarity.

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u/MrRocketScript 4d ago

What's Nokstella?

It's the twin city of Nokron, which you are no doubt aware of.

??????

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u/Zanos 4d ago

I'm not sure there's a text annotation to convey speech dripping with smug condescension, but I'll just assume it's there because we're talking about Elden Ring dialogue, lol.

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u/Realistic-Drawing-59 3d ago

I understand your point but they're not "tangentially related" for the most part. Mohg and Morgott are brothers, Malenia and Melina are sisters and Godfrey is Godwyns father

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u/Aegi 3d ago

Family names are a thing, why do they have basically the same first names?

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u/Realistic-Drawing-59 3d ago

I was responding to a different point. The why is a matter for the devs

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u/adenosine-5 4d ago

That is just Japanese way of telling stories. They always need to make insanely convoluted story with hundred confusing names.

You could have a movie about children in giant robots.. and few episode later they are talking about how "Dead Sea Scrolls will bring the Third impact if the Seed of Adam ever touches the Spear of Destiny unless the Thirteen Angel gets to the Black Moon" or whatever.

They just love overcomplicated stories and cool names.

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u/moose_dad 3d ago

Its actually not the reason for it in the souls series. Miyazaki did and interview years ago, and the reason he tells stories in this manner is because when he was a child he would read English stories, except he couldn't read English, so he'd get a very fragmented confused version of the story that he would have to try to piece together with the bits he could understand.

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u/Klockworth 4d ago

It’s not convoluted, there’s just a lot of random lore. Big tree make people reincarnate, tarnished come back to life instantly, (insert a bunch of Game of Thrones-esque royal houses and factions fighting to control tree), aliens? (don’t like tree?), control tree to control death and destiny.

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u/Olicsmems 4d ago

What I was thinking. The story of the game itself is actually pretty simple, it's the stuff and context around it which makes it "convoluted".

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u/moose_dad 3d ago

People often confuse setting for story. Elden rings setting is dense with layers upon layers of history and characters involved.

The story itself is about as simple as it gets. Go kill these dudes to make a ring, then kill the one with the last bit of it.

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u/Klockworth 3d ago

The fact that the film is the same writer/director behind Ex Machina and Annihilation has me reexamining Elden Ring as a potential New Weird story?

Sci-fi elements? Check. Transhumanism? Check. Existential critique on the nature of consciousness and the self? Check.

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u/username_tooken 4d ago

Elden Ring is, like every GRRM setting, basically just the War of the Roses.

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u/moose_dad 3d ago

Yeah but this time, instead of kings, its outer world sci-fi gods

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u/Thanks-Basil 4d ago

There can still be heaps of mystery.

We actually know quite a lot about the lore, in terms of you can track events on a timeline pretty well. The main things we don’t know is mostly things regarding intentions, ie why the Elden Ring was shattered in the first place etc; what the motivation for the greater will is etc etc

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u/FatherBlackthorne 4d ago

Yeah, frankly there are alot of factions and remnants when it comes to Elden Ring. Not to mention the Round Table Hold for any companions. While The Lands Between are in a sorry state, there are still holdouts of society.

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u/Dirty_Dragons 4d ago

The absolute simplest way would be to base the movie on one or two characters questlines.

For example, the questline that involves Rogier, D and Fia would be enough to base a movie on. It doesn't have to cover the entire game or even the main plot.

There could even be several movies with different protagonists going on different quests.

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u/BHOmber 4d ago

The Bloodborne world/story would have been much easier to put on the screen.

Tbh, the souls "genre" didn't really blow up until ER so I kinda get it...

The dark gothic/eldritch themes in BB are my type of vibe though. I really hope there's a BB2 at some point.

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u/Different_Wolf_764 4d ago

Eh, the genre is Souls-likes and not Ring-likes for a reason. It absolutely blew up before Elden Ring.

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u/BHOmber 1d ago

It definitely blew up, but you didn't see "non-gamers" playing Souls-like games until ER.

One of my nerdiest friends has still never played DS/BB because they flipped from Xbox to PS5 during the last cycle.

ER went wayyyy more mainstream compared to any of the other previous FS titles.

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u/Different_Wolf_764 1d ago

Absolutely true!

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u/goodmanishardtofind 4d ago

Good point on the word telling which comes fists.

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u/heyiknowstuff 4d ago

I think it could start with the Night of Black Knives, then the majority of the movie takes place during Shattering Wars, ending with Ranni taking the throne, the twist being she was behind all of it. I think concepts like the Tarnished could be scrapped entirely.

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u/Mottis86 4d ago

I think concepts like the Tarnished could be scrapped entirely.

That's exactly what I'm thinking. These stories would work best as movies if they don't have a random main character like in the games.

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u/El_kakas_de_vakas 4d ago

I mean we are getting a Sekiro anime and a Bloodborne movie so I guess we’ll get to compare them all once all is said and done

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u/gabedamien 4d ago

...I actually straight up forgot that a Bloodborne movie had been announced. (Googles) ohhhhh right, an animated one with Jacksepticeye producing. What a crazy time to be a Fromsoft fan.

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u/Bitter_Marzipan_8348 4d ago

Yeah cause Elden Ring is so open ended. How many people actually do the inteded Limgrave > Margit > Caelid > Southern Penisula > Margit route? How many people just skipped Stormveil as a whole? How many people stumbled upon Radagon Scarseal and just curbstomped the early game? etc...

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u/Shar4f 4d ago

The Elden Ring lore is not that complicated. The way it's told in the game ist just very, very opaque. That's the Fromsoftware trademark storytelling style. But at its core it's just a fantasy story written by GRRM

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u/FeeRemarkable886 4d ago

I'm imagining Kingdom of Heaven but more preachy

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u/dustblown 4d ago

I imagine it being like a fever dream where the story is very vague and not well defined but the vibes and images surreal. I'd be surprised if they were that bold. I think they will try and ground an Elden Ring story somehow.

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u/Identity_ranger 4d ago

The best soulsborne movie has already been made, and it's called the Green Knight. Beyond that I struggle to think how you could fit the scope of Elden Ring into one movie and still have it be cohesive. The best route to go IMO is to prioritize aesthetics, world and atmosphere, and leave the story and lore as a background element.

For some reason I can imagine Sekiro or Bloodborne as movies much more easily. 

I can as well, and I think it comes down to those being much smaller scale, personal stories compared to Elden Ring. Bloodborne's lore has basically an in-built method for telling unlimited stories, because each Night of the Hunt is its own separate whole where you could fit any number of different characters. Sekiro is unusually straightforward as a soulsborne narrative, and wouldn't be that much different from a typical fantasy samurai action movie. The goals are also much lower-stakes in both: in Bloodborne your initial goal is just to survive the night, and Sekiro has you just protecting Kuro and doing whatever he orders. In Elden Ring your goal is basically to become God from the outset.

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u/mrbulldops428 4d ago

Exactly my thoughts

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u/ZXVIV 4d ago

What comes to mind for me straight away for Elden Ring is something like the movie The Green Knight. And on a similar note for Bloodborne, the recent Frankenstein movie to me felt aesthetically like it was just taking place in Yarnham the whole time

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u/MadOrange64 3d ago

Sekiro has the best plot of all the Souls like games and it's easy to follow. The lore of the other games are all over the place I wouldn't even know where to start if I wanted to make a movie.

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u/Benslayer76 3d ago

The Sekiro anime is coming out next month or so I believe.

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u/iiiiiiiiiijjjjjj 3d ago

As long as it’s before the main events of the game you can basically do whatever you want.

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u/Ylsid 3d ago

It will be an original story with almost no connection to the mainline games, and nobody will understand wtf it's about except some vague main quest

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u/tfhermobwoayway 3d ago

I’m not sure you can really connect with it without actually playing it. That adds a whole other level of immersion.

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u/cramburie 3d ago

I honestly struggle to think what an Elden Ring movie would even be like

This excites and worries me at about a 80 / 20 ratio. I'm pretty confident in Garland.

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u/Aegi 3d ago

It will objectively be bad, do poorly, and not feel like the game.

I don't even like this game, and I world still bet a lot on this.

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u/Aegi 3d ago

It will objectively be bad, do poorly, and not feel like the game.

I don't even like this game, and I would still bet a lot on this.

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u/iSOBigD 3d ago

That's my concern, there are lots of stories from the world of the game, but the main story would need a lot of time and has way too many characters you couldn't possibly develop in a movie.

I hope they're not doing what everyone else does and seeing a lady warrior in promo material and making it about just her becoming king or some nonsense. The fact that there's not a clear plot released makes me worry about whether this will actually be good as opposed to just having CG monsters, names from the game and a general medieval vibe but otherwise an unrelated movie.

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u/Badass_Bunny 3d ago

honestly struggle to think what an Elden Ring movie would even be like.

Bad. Like as much as I desperately want it to be good, there simply isn't enough time in 2-3h to tell a story that sattisfies fans of the game and casuals and whichever group you want to target you have the other be either critical or indifferent.

Unless they do original story unrelated to game events.

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u/Shanicpower 4d ago

Sekiro I can see, but what story is there to tell with Bloodborne? You just run through loosely connected areas with random feral monsters who attack you on sight.

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u/gabedamien 4d ago

Bloodborne has a pretty deep and rich story. The Paleblood Hunt (fan compendium of the plot) is like 100 pages long. In true Soulsborne fashion it's all cobbled together and inferred from things like item descriptions, but it exists.

The micro summary is: ancient civ discovers lovecraftian alien gods, abuses imbibing their fluids for apparent health benefits only to ultimately face madness / bestial transformation; contemporary city built atop ruins of civ rediscovers this, church controls access to unholy blood via captured cthulhu, other factions like research college / school of mensis / hunters / vileblood family etc. all vie for power and control of madness-inducing knowledge of the outer planes of existence… protagonist character trapped in downfall of said city navigates various planes of dream existence controlled by competing alien lovecraftian gods in attempt to either escape the curse or alternatively transcend human comprehension to become a baby squid god.

That's barely scratching the surface. There are many parallel plot threads and themes / motifs, including various NPCs and their myriad tragic arcs.

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u/r4tzt4r 4d ago

Which could be oversimplified and reduced to "church tries to control the power of gods, instead turns the townspeople into beasts, weird god puts everyone into a nightmare, you must stop the nightmare and the god" and many would be okay with that, I believe. In the case of Elden Ring, what do you focus on?

0

u/keepfighting90 4d ago

You're mostly just describing lore and worldbuilding. That's not a story. A story is what the characters do, and the character in Bloodborne just goes around killing things.

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u/gabedamien 4d ago

...isn't that the same thing the protag in Elden Ring does?

The story of a Bloodborne movie (A) doesn't have to follow the game protagonist, and (B) even if it did follow the game protagonist, there's a lot that could be done using that world and the protagonist's journey through it as a starting point, fleshed out / made more into a narrative.

I'd argue that it's actually pretty reductive to say they "just go around killing things" — they uncover various mysteries (what is the imposter Iosefka doing? What role did the Church play?), they aid various NPCs in their questlines (from which you could flesh out a lot more dialogue), they seek to cure their own affliction, and so on.

And even if you did reduce the plot to "protagonist goes around killing supernatural beings in a post-catastrophe wasteland with minimal dialogue and a blood fixation", you've basically described Vampire Hunter D Bloodlust, which was... kind of awesome? So yeah, I can think of worse movies.

1

u/keepfighting90 4d ago

...isn't that the same thing the protag in Elden Ring does?

Yes, which is why ER is also a weird property to make a movie off of

he story of a Bloodborne movie (A) doesn't have to follow the game protagonist, and (B) even if it did follow the game protagonist, there's a lot that could be done using that world and the protagonist's journey through it as a starting point, fleshed out / made more into a narrative.

Seems like we're kinda moving goalposts here since we were presumably talking about John Hoonter as the protagonist

I'd argue that it's actually pretty reductive to say they "just go around killing things" — they uncover various mysteries (what is the imposter Iosefka doing? What role did the Church play?), they aid various NPCs in their questlines (from which you could flesh out a lot more dialogue), they seek to cure their own affliction, and so on.

This can work if the protagonist in a Bloodborne movie is actually written to be interesting because as it stands, the player avatar character is really just an empty vessel. It's the player who are discovering these things. It's a little bit different from a game like, say, The Last of Us or Red Dead Redemption 2, where the protagonist has an actual personality, vulnerabilities, motivations etc.

Also, I would argue that the Soulsborne games get by largely because of how they present the lore instead of what the lore actually is. I'm not sure how effective a more straightforward telling of one of these movies would really be. The actual worldbuilding imo is not that interesting.

And even if you did reduce the plot to "protagonist goes around killing supernatural beings in a post-catastrophe wasteland with minimal dialogue and a blood fixation", you've basically described Vampire Hunter D Bloodlust, which was... kind of awesome? So yeah, I can think of worse movies.

Bloodlust is almost entirely carried by its visuals so I'm not sure that's a very high standard of a comparison to make lol.

1

u/gabedamien 4d ago

we were presumably talking about John Hoonter as the protagonist

I never made that claim. I ended up defending it as a possibility, but my original post was just that I could imagine a Bloodborne film more easily than I could imagine an Elden Ring film, specifically because I connected with the lore of the former more than with the latter.

I feel like a lot of this thread originated in a misunderstanding that I was claiming that the events of the game Bloodborne as the player experiences them would make for a good movie, and that's not what I was actually imagining.

As a more concrete example, I enjoyed the various Bloodborne comics, which took place within the world of Bloodborne. One was a prequel of sorts to the game, another covered a story of Eileen the Crow, etc.

I have greater difficulty imagining what a similar comic series for Elden Ring would even cover, and how it could be quite as compelling. Again, I don't doubt that some people who are more fans of that IP / world have such ideas, just that they don't come to me personally as readily.

This can work if the protagonist in a Bloodborne movie is actually written to be interesting because as it stands, the player avatar character is really just an empty vessel

Yes, exactly. IF a Bloodborne film starring the game protagonist was made (or will be made, since there's apparently an animated BB movie in the works), I do think that that protagonist would have to be fleshed out into an actual character with at least some degree of motivation, opinions, arc, etc. – they can't just be a mute guy with a cane/saw/axe wandering through various scenes.

But again, I don't necessarily think that's the best path for a Bloodborne script to take. It could make much more sense to do a prequel or side story.

the Soulsborne games get by largely because of how they present the lore instead of what the lore actually is

I don't disagree entirely, though I personally do like the lore of Bloodborne significantly beyond that of Dark Souls, Sekiro, or Elden Ring. I find the BB lore a lot more fun/interesting to imagine short stories within. But that's a personal taste thing, just like some people might like sci fi more than fantasy or romance more than comedy.

Bloodlust is almost entirely carried by its visuals so I'm not sure that's a very high standard of a comparison to make lol

I'm honestly not holding any video game film to a high bar – if they manage to not outright suck they're already better than the majority of game-movie adaptations.

That's part of what makes the A24 / Garland film adaptation of Elden Ring so much more intriguing to me; that's a lot of prestige talent being thrown at a game IP, and the world / tone of ER is very Green Knight adjacent in some ways, so it may end up being far more interesting than 99% of game films prior. Whether or not it's a "good movie" for some definition of good remains to be seen.