2028 is shaping up to be a big year for movies based on videogames. Just days after Activision and Paramount revealed that the Call of Duty film they're working on is set to debut in June 2028, Bandai Namco and A24 have announced that the Elden Ring film will hit screens on March 3 of the same year.
The release date news comes alongside the reveal of the full Elden Ring film cast, and it's... stacked-ish? There are some names in it I recognize, anyway.
- Kit Connor (Warfare, Heartstopper)
- Ben Whishaw (Skyfall, Paddington)
- Cailee Spaeny (Alien: Romulus, Civil War)
- Tom Burke (Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, Black Bag)
- Havana Rose Liu (Bottoms)
- Sonoya Mizuno (Ex Machina)
- Jonathan Pryce (The Two Popes)
- Ruby Cruz (Willow, Bottoms)
- Nick Offerman (The Last of Us)
- John Hodgkinson
- Jefferson Hall
- Emma Laird
- Peter Serafinowicz
I'm not really a movie guy (more of a movie theme song guy, really) so we're not going to go too deep here, but Nick Offerman obviously leaps out: I still see him pretty much exclusively as Ron Swanson from Parks and Recreation, but he's done some amazing work since then, including an Emmy award-winning turn in The Last of Us.
The presence of Peter Serafinowicz, who for some reason ended up playing Darth Maul in The Phantom Menace, is also great: He's known for being tremendously funny, deeply weird, and unexpectedly menacing, sometimes in various combinations of the three, which would seem to make him a great fit for an Elden Ring weirdo.
And of course Jonathan Pryce is a legendary actor who messed up Stellan Skarsgård real bad in Ronin. (He's done a lot of other stuff too but Ronin is really great, so I'm sneaking a mention.) I'm sure everyone else in the cast is very good, too.
Despite not being a big film buff, I'm genuinely eager to check out the Elden Ring movie, or at least to make someone else on the team watch it and hear what they think. Because as someone who loved Elden Ring and played the absolute hell out of it, I had absolutely no idea what was going on throughout the experience, nor what it all added up to when it was over. A divine world brought to ruin by the hubris of the gods something something, I guess?
But in terms of coherent story—the sort of thing a game can live without, but a film absolutely cannot—I stand by my long-held position that Elden Ring is maybe the purest expression of sound and fury signifying nothing. Which I don't mean as a negative, just that it's way past time we all acknowledge that this guy was right:
For the record, that's why I'm not even going to try guessing about who's playing what (the announcement doesn't say), but I'll tell you this much: If I only watch one videogame-based movie in 2028, based on the candidates I've seen so far it's going to be this one. The announcement says production on the Elden Ring film "begins in spring 2026."
