Tears of the Kingdom team ‘interested’ in Zelda movie after Mario success
The Super Mario Bros. movie is by far the biggest hit of 2023 to date, grossing over $521.8 million in the United States and $1.1 billion in total worldwide. Nintendo could call it a win and walk away, but the year has only just begun. If Mario entering its sixth weekend at the box office, there is only one real threat to its complete hold on audiences of all ages: The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom. The highly anticipated Zelda sequel is here and destined to be another astronomical win for the company.
Nintendo’s undeniable grip on the zeitgeist raises an important question: where is the Zelda movie?
At the end of Polygon’s big interview with Tears of the Kingdom producer Eiji Aonuma and director Hidemaro Fujibayashi, we were eager to know if a Zelda movie was a distant possibility, let alone one on the horizon. The answer held promise for anyone hoping to one day put down the controller and bask in the glow of Hyrule.
“I’m definitely interested,” Aonuma told Polygon through an interpreter. “But unfortunately I’m not the only one interested in something that makes things happen!”
While Aonuma may refer to the visionary Legend of Zelda and Mario creator Shigeru Miyamoto, a noted perfectionist, it takes other titans to move earth at Nintendo. During an investor call earlier in May, CEO Shuntaro Furukawa signaled to investors and the unrest world that the company doesn’t want to rush new movie projects based on Nintendo characters. Asked about expanding non-game revenue streams, an inevitable one Super Mario Bros. movie didn’t even come up. If there’s a theatrical future for Link, Zelda, and Ganondorf, it’s not happening in the near future. But Aonuma wants to see it.
Although the 1993 Super Mario Bros. live-action film left the scorched earth worthy of Calamity, keeping Nintendo stingy about getting its characters to appear in other mediums, the 2000s saw a steady stream of Zelda adaptation rumors. The biggest was an alleged Zelda TV series on Netflix; leaked by Wall Street Journal in 2015although never confirmed by the streamer or Nintendo, Adam ruins everything host Adam Conover oddly provided most of the evidence that indeed something was. In a 2021 episode of The Serf Times podcastConover explained that during his time at CollegeHumor he was recruited to work on a claymation version of StarFox – which apparently imploded after the Netflix Zelda project leak.
During press before The Super Mario Bros. movie earlier this year, Miyamoto was also asked about the company’s interests in adaptations, and whether Illumination, the company behind the CG animated film, would direct future projects. “There’s nothing I can really comment on at the moment,” he said. “But we started with the fact that we have a shared vision of creation, so I think there will be opportunities going forward.”
Aonuma wants to see a Zelda movie, but right now there really don’t seem to be any plans to take advantage of it The Super Mario Bros. movie – chalk it up to Nintendo’s patronage and perfectionism. But Tears of the Kingdom CEO Hidemaro Fujibayashi also told Polygon that there’s a larger entity — outside of makers, outside of CEOs — who “make things happen,” to use Aonuma’s words.
“Maybe the fan voices are what’s important here!” Fujibayashi said.