Anyone who has played Elden Ring knows the feeling of opening a door, finding something enormous on the other side and realising you have badly underestimated the cost of the next ten minutes. A24 appears to have had the same experience. According to The Wall Street Journal, Alex Garland’s film of FromSoftware’s 2022 game has cost nearly $200 million, roughly double the figure floating about when the cameras rolled in April. A24 hasn’t commented, so this remains a report rather than a receipt, but if it is right, it is by a very long way the most expensive thing the company has ever made.
For context, the previous A24 records were reported as around $70 million for Marty Supreme and about $50 million for Garland’s own Civil War. This is the studio that sold us Hereditary, Midsommar and a hot-dog-fingered universe in Everything Everywhere All at Once on budgets that would barely cover the catering on a Marvel film. Now it is spending blockbuster money on a video game in which most players die to the same knight on a horse forty times before lunch. Using the usual rule of thumb that a film has to gross about two and a half times its budget to break even, the commentators are already doing worried sums in the region of half a billion dollars.
The film is a co-production between A24, DNA Films (Andrew Macdonald and Allon Reich, Garland’s long-time British producers) and Bandai Namco, with George R. R. Martin, who wrote the game’s mythology for FromSoftware, among the producers. Kit Connor leads a cast that includes Cailee Spaeny, Ben Whishaw, Nick Offerman, Tom Burke, Havana Rose Liu, Sonoya Mizuno, Emma Laird, Peter Serafinowicz and Jonathan Pryce. Garland reportedly won FromSoftware over with a 160-page spec script and forty pages of imagery, which is the cinematic equivalent of turning up to a boss fight fully levelled.
The British angle is a cheerful one. Principal photography began in the UK in April, including Scotland, and in May the unit was spotted in North Wales at Dinorwic slate quarry, Dolbadarn Castle and Conwy Castle, before heading to Iceland for the summer. A leaked set video, believed to have been shot at the Old Royal Naval College in Greenwich, appeared to show a Dung Eater being pelted by an angry mob, which is about the most faithful adaptation of that particular character anyone could ask for. Filming wrapped on 30th July. So the Lands Between will be, at least in part, Gwynedd with fog, which anyone who has walked up Snowdon in October will agree is not much of a stretch.
The money is the real question. Garland is one of the most interesting directors working in British genre film, but Ex Machina, Annihilation, Men and Civil War were brilliant, divisive and comparatively modest, and none came close to the box office now needed. Annihilation, in particular, was such a tough sell that Paramount handed its international release to Netflix. On the other side of the ledger, Elden Ring has sold well over twenty million copies and the game’s fans are famously patient. They have to be. As for Martin, there is a very real chance that the Elden Ring film will reach cinemas before The Winds of Winter reaches bookshops, and we suspect he knows it.
There is no trailer yet. Elden Ring is due in US cinemas and IMAX on 3rd March 2028, with a UK date to follow. Until then, A24 must do what every Tarnished does after a very expensive mistake: sit at the Site of Grace, have a good think, and hope the next attempt goes better.
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