I turned my (dark) fantasy of a Zelda movie into reality

26.08.2023 - 16:25 / polygon.com / Ridley Scott / Zelda Movie / Of A

As kids, we played make-believe in the world of Hyrule on the playground. My friends and I hunted for the spirits of restless Poes on the wood chips beneath the monkey bars. The corkscrew slide was our portal to the Lost Woods. And when the bell rang, we pretended it was the ominous clocktower from Majora’s Mask, signaling the “Dawn of the Last Day.” We made up our own dark and fantastic storylines, and acted them out like theLegend of Zelda movie of our dreams.

I’m older now, and though I don’t play make-believe quite as much as before, I haven’t stopped imagining a movie adaptation of Nintendo’s great adventure series. So, when I lost my job a few weeks ago and suddenly found myself with a whole lot of free time, I decided the day had finally come to make my (dark) fantasy a reality. Yes, I made aLegend of Zelda movie… kind of. Since being laid off, I’ve cut together a trailer, an opening credits roll, and a breakdown video, and I wrote a 40-page story treatment for a whole-ass feature film called A Link to the Lost Age (more on that later).

This isn’t just fanfiction or childhood wish fulfillment, though. Let’s be real — Nintendo and Universal are going to announce a Zeldafollow-up to the billion-dollar Super Mario Bros. Movie any day now. So I see my project as a simple plea: If you’re going to bring the Master Sword to the big screen, please don’t forget to give it some sharp edges. That is to say: Please don’t make The Legend of Zelda just another Minions movie!

This whole project really began a few months ago, when I watched Ridley Scott’s Legend for the first time. My podcast co-host and I were planning our next miniseries for our show Eye of the Duck, and I’d been curious about the dark fantasy movies of the 1980s. Five minutes into Legend, I could already tell we were going to devote the next weeks and months of our podcast (and our lives!) to this film and all the others like it.

Released in 1985, Legend is most famous for Tim Curry’s portrayal of the devil, who now might as well be the definitive movie Satan (though in the film he’s simply called “Darkness”). The film is a dark, windswept, glitter-dusted hallucination, an experience so disorienting that Gene Siskel said it was like “recalling a bad dream” (he hated it). It’s also rumored to have inspired the creation of the first Zelda game, though that’s almost certainly impossible, since they were in production at the exact same time. I can understand the suspicion that Legend and Zelda may somehow be blood-related, though. The film lives in this uncomfortable space between a hack-and-slash epic and a surrealist horror film about the terrors of growing up and living in a world where, whether we like it or not, darkness always exists