A live-action Zelda movie is officially on the way with Nintendo's full support, but once upon a time series creator Shigeru Miyamoto adamantly opposed the idea of such a film. In fact, he said he wouldn't okay a Zelda film even if one of the most respected names in Hollywood was making the pitch.
The Video Game History Foundation recently interviewed Nintendo of America legend Gail Tilden for the latest episode of its Video Game History Hour podcast. Tilden headed up NOA's marketing from 1983 to 2007, overseeing everything from the US debut of the NES to the explosive arrival of Pokemon on American shores. In the wake of Pokemon's success, Tilden's department "kind of took over both merchandise and entertainment" licensing for Nintendo's properties.
"People were always calling about doing a movie," Tilden says. "You can imagine that the most common question is, 'We’re calling, we’d like to do a Zelda movie.' The answer was always no. Even I personally said, 'Mr. Miyamoto, if Steven Spielberg himself wants to do a Zelda movie, what is the answer?' He said, 'No.' So that was it. The answer was always no."
It's easy to imagine why Miyamoto would've been so adamantly against the idea - after all, this wasn't that far removed from the 1993 Super Mario Bros. movie. That film's developed something of cult following over the years, but at the time it was regarded as an absolute disaster and captures pretty much none of the jovial tone of the games it's based on.
But then we got The Super Mario Bros. Movie in 2023, an animated film that set the box office alight with a story much truer to the original games. It's after the success of this movie that Nintendo partnered up with Sony to co-finance a Zelda movie led by Wes Ball, director of The Maze Runner trilogy and Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes. This time, Miyamoto is serving as one of the film's producers.
While Miyamoto didn't want a Zelda movie to get made back in the '00s, another Nintendo luminary - Metroid lead Yoshio Sakamoto - was "open to pitches on Metroid," Tilden says. Reports about the Metroid movie rights bounced around throughout the '00s, and at one point legendary action director John Woo was developing a film.
"We had several meetings" over the Metroid movie, Tilden says. "It took a long time. We would talk about who should play Samus. 'Should it be Charlize Theron? Should it be...?' 'No, she’s not right.' Anyway, it was on and on about who the actresses that they could see as Samus, but we never settled on anything. I think they thought she’s not such a beauty, as opposed to kind of an athlete."
Tilden notes that a Metroid film would've required a "significant" budget, and "at the time, the only female action movie that had come out was Halle Berry’s Catwoman, and it didn’t do well. So John Woo’s company pitched for Metroid, but we did not make a sale. That is the truth of why that particular project didn’t happen." Yes, the death of the Metroid movie is at least partly due to the Razzie award winning superhero film. What a legacy.
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