Alex Garland’s Elden Ring adaptation is on course to be Hollywood’s goriest ever fantasy movie

The expansive project has hype and money behind it – but how do you avoid it falling into the disappointment trap so many films end up stumbling into?

If the history of failed Hollywood fantasy projects over the past 20 years has taught us anything, it is that transporting audiences to another world is only half the battle: you also have to give them a reason to spend several hours there. The Golden Compass diluted Philip Pullman’s theological bite, Warcraft thought that just explaining its world would make us care about it, and The Dark Tower compressed Stephen King’s sprawling mythology so ruthlessly that it scarcely left room for a story. All these films at one point had fans of the original source material quivering with anticipation at the prospect of seeing their beloved worlds on the big screen; all ended up disappointing.

Which brings us to the forthcoming Alex Garland adaptation of the hugely popular high fantasy video game, Elden Ring. If there was ever a cinematic test of the phrase “too big to fail”, it is surely this. Elden Ring has sold more than 30m copies and is widely regarded as one of the greatest video games ever made. George RR Martin himself wrote the foundational mythology of warring demigods that underpins its gorgeous fantasy hellscape. And Garland as writer-director seems almost impossibly perfect: as the creative behind Dredd, Ex Machina and Annihilation, he has both the taste for beautiful nightmares and the geek credentials to deliver something extraordinary.

It appears the movie has already been shot and is in post-production, with a cast including Cailee Spaeny, Ben Whishaw, Nick Offerman, Sonoya Mizuno, Peter Serafinowicz and Jonathan Pryce. Amazon MGM has reportedly snapped up streaming rights across numerous international markets, while theatrical distribution rights are being touted at November’s American Film Market, where it will reportedly be the most expensive stand-alone project ever offered for sale. Deadline suggests the budget is close to $200m, which ought to pay for at least a couple of Elden Ring’s repulsive resident monstrosities’ more expensive mutations.

And that’s the thing about the game: it veers far closer to full-on horror than anything we’ve seen so far in mainstream Hollywood swords and sorcery. There are creatures with writhing worms for faces. There are enormous, bodiless hand spiders that scuttle about on eight or more fingers. There are mechanical iron maidens that hurtle towards you on wheels, swinging enormous blades, before their bellies spring open and a nest of snakes drags you into the machinery.

If the far more wholesome The Lord of the Rings was once considered unfilmable, what hope for a fantasy world where almost everyone is dead and the survivors are coping by eating their lovers’ corpses? Will there even be a hero in this thing for audiences to pin their hopes on?

In the game, you hack, slash and spellcast through a zillion dead things before taking on the various demigods in final boss battles, but that can’t and won’t be the extent of the film. Perhaps Garland will draw on the Martin-inspired backstory of how the Lands Between descended into death and destruction in the first place. Leaked images suggest a Leyndell (this world’s capital) populated by living people and hint at the execution of a hideous character known as the Dung Eater (a pre-game event), all of which suggests some sort of prequel might be in play.

It’s hard to see a happy ending here, but perhaps that’s the point. After all, Garland has a record of denying audiences conventional Hollywood-style reassurance. In Annihilation, he brought a married couple back together while leaving us wondering whether either remained human; in Ex Machina, he let the gorgeous AI escape and left her would-be rescuer locked up to die; in Civil War, he overthrew a tyrant but made the victory photograph look like evidence for a future war crimes tribunal. The uncertainty is whether he will get the same freedom with a film costing close to $200m. At the very least, prospective purchasers need to be aware that they are unlikely to be buying the 2026 equivalent of a return to the Shire. Unless, of course, they want a world where something has eaten the hobbits and is now wearing them.