Director says The Legend of Zelda movie will focus on realism

While making a Mario movie only requires making cute cartoons, crammed with jokes and Easter eggs, The Legend of Zelda is much more nuanced and complex, and any adaptation of the angle is likely to upset many fans. Filmmaker Wes Ball recently made it clear that his vision is to be "realistic" and "authentic," eschewing his previous more CG-focused directorial style.

In a brief interview recently, Boll explained that his Zelda film will focus more on live-action performances rather than motion capture and computer-generated characters, saying that other approaches "probably wouldn't be an option for him."

Wes Boll is primarily known for the Maze Runner trilogy of films. He is currently preparing for the next installment in the Planet of the Apes series, replacing Matt Reeves as director of the series, which is also the first work in the series without Andy Serkis. He will also direct the upcoming Legend of Zelda film, which was announced by Nintendo in November 2023 together with producers Shigeru Miyamoto and Avi Arad.

In fact, before Boll broke into the film industry with the CG short film "Ruins" in 2011, he tweeted about his desire to make an all-computer-animated "Legend of Zelda" movie.

Boll told reporters that he wanted his Zelda movie to be more "realistic" and "authentic," before adding that he really shouldn't talk about it. "We're working hard on it, and we're going to make something great," he said, noting that if he continued, "someone at Nintendo would jump out of the bushes and drag me away."

"Rise of the Planet of the Apes" is clearly a motion capture-driven project, with Boll explaining that "there's about 30 or 40 minutes of full CG content in this movie," adding that "every leaf, every bark" was created entirely by computer. "So, I got a little bit of the feeling of Avatar," the director said, perhaps letting him off the hook for a full CG movie.

However, just imagining a Zelda movie being made as a live-action project is terrifying. You don't even know which Zelda style to choose? Whichever one they choose will disappoint a lot of fans, whether it's the cute style of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, the serious style of Skyward Sword, or most likely - the compromise style of Breath of the Wild. It will be fascinating to see which style they choose, how they handle it, and whether it actually gets made.