Alex Garland Pitched an ‘Elden Ring’ Movie in an Insanely Cool Way

In May 2025, it was officially announced that Elden Ring will be turned into a live-action movie. The project is being developed by A24 in partnership with Bandai Namco.

Alex Garland, known for films like Ex Machina and Annihilation, is set to direct and also write the screenplay. Producers include Peter Rice, Andrew Macdonald, Allon Reich, George R.R. Martin, and Vince Gerardis.

Now, thanks to an interview with The New Yorker, new details have come out about how Garland actually pitched the film. The story of how the movie came to be shows just how much effort went into convincing Elden Ring’s creator, Hidetaka Miyazaki, to trust Garland with his work.

It started a few years ago when A24’s Daniel Sacco visited Garland at his home in London. Garland was already a huge fan of the game and showed it off on his PlayStation during their meeting.

Impressed by the visuals and scale of the fantasy world, Sacco compared it to The Lord of the Rings. He immediately told Garland, “F*** yeah,” when asked if A24 would support a film adaptation.

From there, Garland decided to go all in. To gain Miyazaki’s approval, he wrote a massive 160-page script and created 40 pages of artwork and imagery to help bring the vision to life.

Once it was ready, Garland and Sacco flew to Japan to personally pitch the idea to Miyazaki and the team at FromSoftware, the studio behind the game. According to The New Yorker, that meeting was what sealed the deal.

For those unfamiliar, Elden Ring is an action role-playing game developed by FromSoftware and published by Bandai Namco in 2022. It was directed by Hidetaka Miyazaki, the creator of the Dark Souls series, with worldbuilding contributions from author George R.R. Martin.

The game takes place in a vast, open fantasy world called the Lands Between. Players take on the role of the Tarnished, exploring huge landscapes, fighting powerful bosses, and uncovering a deep and mysterious story. The game became a massive success, earning Game of the Year in 2022 and selling over 25 million copies worldwide.

The upcoming film is not the only video game project in the works at A24. The studio is also developing a movie based on Hideo Kojima’s Death Stranding.

Sacco explained in the interview that both Miyazaki and Kojima are considered auteurs in gaming, saying his first question to Kojima was, “Are you sure you don’t want to direct?”

With Garland’s long pitch and passion for the material, expectations are already high for the Elden Ring movie. Fans of the game are curious to see how the dark and complex world of the Lands Between will translate to the big screen.

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