Are video game movies about to take over from Marvel?

Huge numbers for films based on Super Mario and Five Nights at Freddy's have led to news of a Zelda adaptation, suggesting a new lease of life for a once-loathed genre

When Nintendo announced via Twitter/X that Shigeru Miyamoto had been working for years on a live-action The Legend of Zelda movie with the producer Avi Arad, I immediately felt a little queasy. Not because I'd just browsed Arad's production credits, which really do run the gamut, but because like most adults who love video games, I grew up in the era of game movies so unbelievably dreadful that I still sometimes think angry thoughts about them when I'm trying to get to sleep.

It was the era of Jean-Claude Van Damme in Street Fighter, of the fascinatingly terrible 1993 Super Mario cyberpunk nightmare starring Bob Hoskins, of Uwe Boll. Like a kicked dog, I am instinctively fearful. The Zelda series has produced several of the most important, acclaimed games of all time, centred on their mute protagonist, Link, and the various eternally retold and remixed myths of the Kingdom of Hyrule and its royal family (that's Zelda). They are narratively ambiguous, often quite dreamlike, and that works for them. How do you turn that into a gripping movie? Are they going to give Link a voice? A 90s cartoon series turned him into a wisecracking smart-arse and has been relentlessly mocked for it ever since.