The Legend of Zelda live-action movie gets disappointing release window update

Last year, it was announced that Nintendo and Arad Productions were in the process of making a live-action movie based on the iconic video game franchise The Legend of Zelda, with Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes director Wes Ball at the helm. The Legend of Zelda is a classic fantasy tale where a young swordsman named Link fights the forces of evil to save the Princess Zelda and Kingdom of Hyrule; the details change a bit with each game, but the overall story remains more or less the same. Zelda is a long-running video game series that's been around since the 1986, and its fans are legion. Suffice to say, the announcement of a movie was a big deal.

Now we have a little bit better of an idea of when we'll get to watch it...kind of. The sleuths over at IGN always have their nose to the ground for video game news, and just this week they picked up on a financial report from Nintendo which lists a tentative release window for The Legend of Zelda movie. It'll be released...sometime this decade.

More specifically, the report gets into details about Nintendo's "Visual Content," talking up the success of The Super Mario Bros. Movie, which was seen by more than 170 million people according to Nintendo and brought in over $1 billion at the global box office. As of this writing, The Super Mario Bros. Movie is the highest grossing video game movie of all time. Nintendo is planning to release a sequel in 2026. After talking up Mario, the report mentions that Nintendo is "planning and developing a live-action film of The Legend of Zelda," with a penciled in release date of "202X."

So that's not exactly a set-in-stone thing to write home about, but still it's good to know that Nintendo is aiming to release The Legend of Zelda movie sometime in the next five years. Whether it will be any good, time will tell.

Which movie will come first: Zelda or another Planet of the Apes?

The fact that The Legend of Zelda movie has a decent amount of lead time raises an interesting question: will we get another Planet of the Apes sequel before it? Director Wes Ball is attached to Zelda, but after the success of his film Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes, 20th Century Studios sounds pretty bullish about producing a sequel.

Earlier this month, 20th Century CEO Steve Asbell discussed how the studio had finally found a good rhythm for its four big tentpole sci-fi franchises: Planet of the Apes, Alien, Predator, and James Cameron's Avatar. Apparently, figuring out the right way to alternate those films so as not to leave fans of the genre hanging too long was a big priority for the studio after its acquisition by Disney in 2019. According to Asbell, balancing the rhythm of those four big franchises gives the studio room to also greenlight more original films in between. He also dropped a hint that we may see another Apes film sooner rather than later:

"Job one was figuring out these franchise movies first and coming up with the right cadence of Avatar, Apes, Alien and Predator specifically. Getting those right was the first part, which we’ve done now. And so that idea is to be able to say, “Okay, we know when the Avatar movies are coming. We know now about Predator. There’ll be another Apes in ‘27, let’s just say.” So knowing where we can plan those franchises, it helps us look to see and ask what kinds of original movies in terms of genre do we want to test the marketplace with?"

- Steve Asbell

Asbell is speaking hypothetically about there being another Apes movie in 2027...but still, the fact that he was comfortable enough to suggest that year makes me think discussions are underway for the next Planet of the Apes movie.

Back in May, when Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes released, Ball told Variety that he was hoping to do a trilogy of Apes films. When Variety points out that he's already committed to doing Zelda as well, Ball said it's "a good problem to have."

It'll be interesting to see how this all shakes out. The plus side of Ball launching into a Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes sequel is that a lot of the heavy lifting for creating the world was already done in the first film, whereas with The Legend of Zelda he'll be starting from scratch to bring the beloved video game franchise to life on the big screen. Variety compared Ball's predicament to the way Christopher Nolan filmed Inception and The Prestige between new entries of his Batman trilogy. So perhaps Ball can escape the apes for a bit to go to Hyrule. Either way, we'll be seeing a lot more from director Wes Ball in the near future.

Which would you like to see first, The Legend of Zelda or a Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes sequel? Let us know in the comments!

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