This week, Link's dad Shigeru Miyamoto to announce that a live-action 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:The Legend of Zelda adaptation was in the works with Maze Runner director Wes Ball and Spider-Man producer Avi Arad. After the success of 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:The Super Mario Bros. Movie — which grossed $1.362 bill♉ion dollars earlier this year — it seemed safe to expect Nintendo to keep it in the family at Illumination, the animation house that delivered so abundantly for its star plumber. So, Nintendo opting to take the live-action route is definitely a zag.
That's just the first strange decision in an inevitable series of strange decisions that will need to take place to get Link, Zelda, and Ganondorf up on the big screen. TheGamer's Editor-in-Chief Stacey Henley has you covered if you're interested in our best guesses at which actors could play the film's leads (and you can see some of her picks below). So I want to focus on which, if any, games from the series Nintendo should adapt for the movie. My vote is for The Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap. It isn't the choice Nintendo will make. But it's the choice it should make.
There are far more likely choices for source material, though, and 2002’s The Wind Waker would be a great option… if Nintendo was making an animated film. Its cel-shaded art style, which was dubbed "Celda" at the time by angry fanboys, has stood the test of time and still looks fantastic today. But its unique look wouldn't translate to live-action, nor would the fact that much of its action is set on the high seas. You can make movies that take place in and/or on the water, but it's extremely difficult and often expensive. Steven Spielberg's Jaws shoot swelled from a planned 55 days to 159 days, largely due to the difficulties of shooting on the ocean (especially with a temperamental mechanical shark). Waterworld was also a notoriously chaotic production which, like Jaws, took months longer to complete than originally planned. Nintendo could shoot everything on a green screen but, if the live-action Little Mermaid is any indication, that won't look very good, and an ugly Wind Waker movie would defeat the purpose of adapting Wind Waker in the first place.
Nintendo’s decision to embrace live-action instead of animation may mean that they want to position Zelda as a more serious property aimed at a slightly older audience. If that’s the case, I could see the story drawing on Twilight Princess, which was a gloomier, slightly scarier game than Wind Waker, which released four years earlier. Majora🧸’s Mask would also be an option to cater to older kids, but that game’s central mechanic — rewinding the clock in order to accomplish a certain amount of tasks in a three-day time frame — seems like a better fit for a game than a movie.
The Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap is a great 2D Zelda but, like its portable siblings Oracle of Ages and Oracle of Seasons, it was developed by F🍎lagship, not Nintendo. Capcom worked with Flagship as co-developer.
I doubt Nintendo willไ dust off a Game Boy Advance game that it didn’t even develop internally, but The Minish Cap seems like a great fit for a film adaptation. While some game mechanics don’t really translate to less interactive mediums, Link’s Minish Cap ability to grow or shrink at will would translate easily to the big screen. Plenty of movies have been built on the premise of it being fun to see small stuff become big and big stuff get small. Ant-Man, The Indian in the Cupboard, The BFG, Toy Story, and Honey, I Shrunk the Kids and its sequels, along many other films, wring entertainment out of playing with scale.
Getting introduced to the world of Hyrule — its breakable pots, its castle, its keys — and then shrinking Link down so that those elements loom larger than life would be a quick way to render them iconic. Nothing makes something memorable more quickly than seeing it huge. Link could ride a cuckoo. He could confront a Skultula while the size of an ant. He could escape Ganondorf by shrinking down and hiding. There could be a river rafting set piece set in a Kakariko Village gutter. Nintendo could even combine Link's shrinking ability with his power from A Link Between Worlds, which allowed him to turn into a two-dimensional painting and walk along walls. Those two abilities are a recipe for visual invention alone and would be incredible paired together.
There are obvious reasons that Nintendo might not want to draw on Minish Cap, too. If you go for a shrink-’em-up on the first go 'round, casual audiences might assume that Link is just Nintendo's answer for Ant-Man. The game is also lacking some key Zelda elements like the aforementioned Ganondorf, who isn't the villain in Minish Cap. But if Nintendo takes the same approach as in the Mario movie, and makes all elements of Zelda history fair game for one story, we could be looking at a potent brew. Minish Cap would be a killer ingredient in a Zelda stew.
