Filming is underway for Nintendo’s first live-action movie in more than 30 years.

The Legend of Zelda live-action movie is one of those things that seems hard to believe is actually happening. Sure, video game-to-movie adaptations are all the rage recently, and the animated Super Mario Bros. Movie did rake in over a billion dollars at the box office in 2023. But the one and only time Nintendo greenlit a live-action theatrical feature based on one of its games they ended up with 1993’s Super Mario Bros., which was such an unpopular failure that it basically convinced Nintendo to take a 30-year break from movie-making. Zelda itself doesn’t have a particularly impressive adaptation track record either, as even though the U.S.-produced Zelda cartoon segments for the Super Mario Bros. Super Show have gone on to provide fodder for meme posting in the Internet era, they earned few genuine fans during their broadcast run in 1989.

In other words, it’s going to take actual on-set photos to convince a lot of people that the live-action Zelda movie is real…and now those are exactly what we have, thanks to none other than Zelda series creator Shigeru Miyamoto himself.

“This is Miyamoto,” tweeted the legendary game designer, using his customary greeting when at the helm of Nintendo’s official Twitter account, followed by “Filming is underway for the live-action film of The Legend of Zelda in a lush, natural setting, with Bo Bragason-san who will play Zelda and Benjamin Evan Ainsworth-san who will play Link.”

The released stills show Bragason and Ainsworth in the midst of ranging across the wilds of Hyrule, which will be played by the New Zealand countryside. Both are sporting the pointy elf-like ears characteristic of the games’ Hylian people, and the costuming looks great too, walking that tightrope of still looking stylized enough to fit within the franchise’s established aesthetics but without looking too brand-new or impractical that it makes the characters look like they’re cosplaying.

No story details have been revealed yet, but the color of Zelda’s attire immediately brings to mind the shade of blue used in many motifs for Breath of the Wild, the first game in the Zedla franchise for the Nintendo Switch, and that game’s environment, featuring vast undeveloped areas between small villages, also meshes with what we can see in the backgrounds of the stills shared by Miyamoto. Adapting 2017’s Breath of the Wild would also make sense from a storytelling standpoint, as in addition to having a more fleshed-out story and cast of characters than many earlier games in the series, it’s also the most recent major entry point to the franchise for many fans, as 2023’s Tears of the Kingdom is a direct sequel to Breath of the Wild, and before that you have to go all the way back to 2011’s Skyward Sword for the next most-recent Zelda narrative entry point. Breath of the Wild being one of the few Zelda games with a direct sequel also leaves open an easy path to making a follow-up movie as well.

All that said, the Zelda video game franchise has never been afraid of tossing out everything that came before in terms of story and starting all over again, so it’s possible that the movie will be telling its own original tale while retaining a lot of the look and tone of Breath of the Wild by nature of that being what’s most strongly associated with the series at this point in its history.

“Filming is on track for the film’s release on May 7, 2027. It will take a while until the release, so we would be grateful if you would wait patiently and look forward to it,” added Miyamoto in a later tweet, and while it might be hard for fans to be “patient” in the sense of not feeling anxious to know more, it’s a pretty sure bet that they’ll be very willing to head to the theater on the movie’s release date.

Source, images: Twitter/@Nintendo
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