Alex Garland Pitched A Nearly Three Hour Elden Ring Script To FromSoftware – And Won

A24’s Head of Film Noah Sacco has an interesting anecdote about the upcoming Elden Ring movie.

A24 announced they were making the movie with FromSoftware and Bandai Namco Europe last May. Directing the adaptation is Alex Garland.

Most of you will probably know Garland for Civil War, Ex Machina, and possibly, 28 Years Later. He actually wrote all three 28 Days films, dating his film career back all the way to the 2000s.

He also has some experience in the video game industry itself. He was one of several writers for Enslaved: Odyssey to the West. He was also story supervisor for DmC: Devil May Cry.

As you may imagine, Garland must have been familiar with FromSoftware and Elden Ring. As it turns out, he was the one who chased this project when he got the chance.

Alex Garland’s Strong Pitch For The Elden Ring Movie.

Alex Barasch, writing for The New Yorker, shared this anecdote:

A few years ago, Sacco visited Garland at home during a trip to London. The director, who had gushed on the phone about Elden Ring, showed off the game on his PlayStation, then asked whether A24 would back an adaptation.

The lush visuals and fantasy setting reminded Sacco of the “Lord of the Rings” movies. He replied, “Fuck yeah.”

Garland, in the hope of garnering the support of the game’s elusive creator, Hidetaka Miyazaki, offered to write a script on spec.

Once he had completed an epic hundred-and-sixty-page draft (with forty additional pages of imagery), Sacco flew with him to Japan to close the deal with Elden Ring’s developer and publisher.

That Elden Ring Script Sounds Insane

Those of you who studied film or film writing to some degree may know about this rule; one page of a movie script usually equals one minute of the film itself. This isn’t a hard rule Hollywood enforces, like that’s possible. It’s something that naturally occurs with film scripts in general.

So, that 160 page Elden Ring script would lead to a 160 minute Elden Ring movie. That’s two hours and forty minutes!

Three-hour movies aren’t necessarily unknown in Hollywood. Titanic, Malcolm X, and the Lord of the Rings movies run this long or longer. More recently, Oppenheimer is an even three hours.

But you would still be right to marvel at what a huge movie Alex Garland came up with for Elden Ring. We don’t know if the final movie will turn out to be this big too. Given how much FromSoftware doesn’t explain in their games, this feels like Alex wants to pick up the slack.