A short list of games A24 should adapt instead of Elden Ring

By now, you’ve probably heard the news that Civil War and Ex Machina director Alex Garland has been tapped to direct the Elden Ring movie. That’s right, the video game that has such a sparse script a cottage industry of YouTubers has perked up to explain it all is headed for the big screen. Maybe.

There’s a lot of stuff that could be adapted into a script in Elden Ring—after all most of that game is lore—but every time I try to figure out what an Elden Ring movie looks like, I just can’t envision it. Elden Ring isn’t as obviously adaptable as something like Sony’s Naughty Dog’s HBO’s The Last of Us, a game that had ambitions to be a television series from launch. Say what you will about The Last of Us adaptation, but from all directions, it appears to be faithful…to fans’ enjoyment and games media’s chagrin.

You can feel all sorts of ways about the Elden Ring movie, but instead of digging into the deep lore or explaining why Boc: Tailor to the Elden Lord is the movie I expect Alex Garland to make, I’d like to pitch you on five games that A24 should tap their directors to make instead of Elden Ring.

Senua’s Sacrifice by Robert Eggers

Let’s start off with something easy. Senua’s Sacrifice is a story about a broken woman fighting through Hel to recover the soul of her dead lover. She is assaulted by enemies just as much as her own psyche, a story that fits perfectly with Eggers’ mythic and unsettling style. Robert Eggers—director of The VVitch, The Lighthouse, and the recent remake of Nosferatu—seems to have a thing for dingy, black-and-white-ish horror movies that have the weirdest vibes. The modern fable of The Lighthouse or The VVitch—the Scarlet Letter-turned horror movie—shows us he can do some wild mythological nightmare fuel. So why not go the next step and hand this madman the keys to Senua’s Sacrifice: deep psychological horror, a muted, but arresting art style, and an experience you just need to see (and hear) on the big screen.

Grand Theft Auto by Harmony Korine

This one is cheating a little bit because let’s be honest, Spring Breakers is just a Grand Theft Auto quest line anyways. But stick with me. Vice City is hot and coming back for GTA6 (the biggest event in gaming, if you haven’t heard), so an artsy, experimental movie about crime shot like the weirdest music video is bound to hit. If there’s one director who could see the mayhem and chaos of GTA Online and find a way to inject that into a movie, it’s Harmony Korine. As the satirical references Rockstar makes no longer resonate with the conspiracy-fueled reality we live in, we need a director that can expand on GTA’s absurdity and make it the piece of satire it so desperately wants to be.

Halo: Fall of Reach by Alex Garland

Halo seems to be the unadaptable property, each swing at the ball creating memes, instead of lasting media. Remember that last show? How about the fact that you got to see Master Chief’s butt? Now you remember. Here’s the thing though, just like Microsoft breaking glass and bringing Cortana back, there is one piece of Halo fiction that is guaranteed to please the fans and fair-weather Halo players: Halo Reach. The Fall of Reach is a tragedy on a planetary scale exploring the hubris of human military might, unwinnable odds, and what makes us human. Honestly, the Fall of Reach is just about the perfect mishmash of Garland’s films: Annihilation’s alien weirdness, Dredd’s visceral super soldier combat, and the human stories on both sides of a conflict in Civil War and Warfare. But listen, if he’d like to adapt DmC: Devil May Cry—a video game he cowrote—I wouldn’t be mad.

The Witcher by David Lowery

In a world of monsters, The Witcher continues to show that the deeds of men are far worse. Pairing The Witcher with David Lowery is basically a vibes-based pick (go watch The Green Knight!), but there’s so many different ways to tell a Witcher story that isn’t trying to ape Game of Thrones. The Netflix series showed us the easiest adaptation of the property, but the first two books in the series are short story collections with stories ranging from horror to epic adventure. The Green Knight is ethereal and plays out like the myth it is, something that I think The Witcher could use: a fable-esque depiction of the titular monster hunter. In The Witcher 3, the lauded quest The Bloody Baron is a tight parable that could translate to the screen well. You get your monster slaying, I get my grim dressing down of those in power, and we’ll all get to see the spookiest depiction of three crones in a long time. Sounds like a perfect fit to me.

Observation by Ari Aster

All of the previous choices have been big obvious games; maybe not all on the scale of Elden Ring, but games you’ve heard of. Here’s my real pitch though: give Ari Aster Observation. Observation is an sci-fi thriller that takes place on a space station orbiting Saturn. You play as the station AI, jumping from camera to camera trying to figure out how the crew has mysteriously disappeared. It’s a tense thriller that evolves into an otherworldly horror game as Saturn’s hexagonal storm becomes pivotal to the mystery…and the murder. There’s a lot of shared DNA with something like Hereditary, and I think Aster’s penchant for horror and grim imagery could really bring this what if 2001: A Space Odyssey was a horror movie from the eyes of HAL project to life.

I’m not mad about an Elden Ring movie, but in a world where the biggest games are given to prestige companies to make faithful adaptations, I’d love to see someone take the video action figures and put their own spin on it in a big way. We’ll see if this project ever takes off—it wouldn’t be the first time a video game movie died on the vine—but I’m hopeful that it’ll be at least fine. But hey, since I’ve got you here anyways, LAIKA Studios (Paranorman, Kubo and the Two Strings, Coraline) should do South of Midnight, Joseph Kosinski (Oblivion, Tron: Legacy, Top Gun: Maverick) needs to make an Ace Combat movie alluding to the SGUF, and I’d love to see Denis Villeneuve’s Mass Effect looks like. Oh, and Guy Richie should do “Deathloop” just because that would be fun.