'Elden Ring' And 7 Other Upcoming Video Game Adaptations
With the consistent critical and commercial success of recent projects as varied as The Last of Us, A Minecraft Movie, Resident Evil and the Sonic the Hedgehog trilogy, video game adaptations are beginning to overtake comic books as Hollywood’s go-to IP. Now, even arthouse titans A24 are getting involved, with an adaptation of Elden Ring reportedly in the works with Alex Garland (Warfare, 28 Years Later) on board to write and direct.
With so many untapped resources still out there, it’s not surprising that studios are racing to fill their rosters. From nostalgic gems to modern classics, let’s take a look at 10 of the most exciting video game adaptations currently in production.
Depending on how you look at it, the vast open world and possibilities of Elden Ring could either be made for the cinematic experience or basically unadaptable.
Directed by Hidetaka Miyazaki (the man responsible for the Dark Souls series) with world building by none other than Game of Thrones creator George R. R. Martin, Elden Ring has the potential to become a multi-film franchise, so all credit to A24 and writer-director Alex Garland for being bold enough to try.
Garland will point to his work on Annihilation, a surreal science fiction novel from Jeff VanderMeer that he managed to wrangle into an entertaining two hour movie. How Garland fares with The Tarnished and The Land Between, however, will be fascinating to see.
Jason Momoa, Andrew Koji (Bullet Train), Noah Centineo (Warfare) and WWE star Roman Reigns are all rumored to be involved with Street Fighter: The Movie, a new adaptation of SEGA’s classic beat ’em up.
Jean-Claude Van Damme’s Street Fighter (1994) still packs a lively punch, but 2009’s The Legend of Chun Li was a commercial flop, so the jury’s still out on this one.
You don’t often expect IP franchises to improve with each installment, but that really has been the case with the Sonic movies so far. How they will make do without Jim Carrey’s energy (whose performances never once felt like just a paycheck) is the main question that will hang over Sonic the Hedgehog 4.
Casey, Miller and Wittington will once again provide the screenplay. Against the odds, they’ve yet to let us down.
He might be a certified cinephile, but Hideo Kojima’s work has so far resisted the big screen treatment. There’s been talk of Metal Gear movies (with both Viggo Mortensen and Oscar Isaac attached) for years, but Death Stranding seems like the real deal.
Announced in 2023 by A24 and now with Michael Sarnoski (Pig, A Quiet Place: Day One) attached to direct, Kojima San’s surreal but finely detailed post-apocalyptic world is the perfect fit for the cinematic treatment. If the producers can round up the same stars (Léa Seydoux, Mads Mikkelsen, and Guillermo del Toro all appeared in the game), it will have one hell of a cast.
Until this month, not a whole lot had come to light about the Gears of War movie since Netflix announced that it picked up the rights to film the locust horde invasion back in 2022.
Now it seems that the, erm, gears are finally in motion with former stuntman and Deadpool 2 director David Leitch in talks to direct with Dune co-writer Jon Spaihts on script duty. It’s early days, but that combination of light and dark sounds intriguing—at least Dave Bautista seems to think so.
On stage at the CET convention in January 2025, PlayStation Productions head Asad Qizilbash announced that a live-action adaptation of Guerilla Games’ popular open worlder, Horizon Zero Dawn, was in production with Columbia Pictures.
Uncharted, the studios’ last collaboration, made a decent profit without winning over too many fans, so let’s hope the Horizon Zero Dawn movie fares better.
The robotic beasts and classic “hero’s quest” template seem like a no-brainer for blockbuster success, it’s just sad that the silky-voiced Lance Reddick, who passed away in 2023, won’t be around to reprise his role as Sylens.
Get your houseguests in the pool and take away that ladder because The Sims movie is coming. In 2024, it was announced that Margot Robbie’s LuckyChap would produce the popular game with Kate Herron (Loki, The Last of Us) on board to direct.
Everything for this one has so fer been kept under lock and key, but given Robbie’s Barbie connection, we can expect a good dash of social commentary behind those iconic green diamonds.
