To this day, 40 years after the first Legend of Zelda came to the NES, Link has never uttered a word in any of the games. (Well, except in the CD-I games, but we don’t count those.) What started out as a limitation of early hardware grew into one of the Nintendo icon’s defining characteristics. Will the company stick to that for the upcoming live-action movie? I heavily suspect it won’t, though I agree with Majora’s Mask art director Takaya Imamura that the Hero of Time should be kept as quiet as possible.
The 2027 movie’s lead roles have already been cast, with Benjamin Evan Ainsworth as Link and Bo Bragason as Zelda, and Takaya recently weighed in on the question of just how chatty the two should be. “The moment Link speaks, I can’t help but worry a little that the ‘Zelda magic’ everyone has been nurturing in their hearts might just vanish into thin air,” he wrote on X on April 4, according to the platform’s translation.
He was seemingly referring to the powerful grip the franchise’s characters and mythology have had on fans, which stems in part from a sense of discovery and how much The Legend of Zelda has traditionally shown rather than told. While other characters have told Link where to go and shared exposition about the world players are exploring, few series have left as much unsaid, and thus up to the player’s imagination, as Zelda.
Imamura, who is best known for his work on Star Fox and left Nintendo a few years back after decades at the company, has had his comment about the upcoming movie rattle across the internet and recently tried to walk it back a little. “It’s not that I don’t want you to talk at all; rather, I hope you can keep that Link-like taciturnity instead of chattering on too much,” he wrote on X yesterday (via the platform’s translation). “Somehow the conversation’s getting a bit grand.”
I think Imamura remains right in both cases. I’d love the live-action movie to carry over some of the magic from the games, keeping Link quiet and making him more of an avatar for the audience or a cipher for what’s going on in the world rather than someone who brings the whole fantasy back down to earth by arguing with Zelda or, god forbid, actually trying to crack jokes.
Unfortunately, Nintendo’s approach with The Super Mario Bros. Movie and its sequel suggest that’s not in the cards. Maybe I’ll turn out to be terribly mistaken, but the Switch maker and its Hollywood partners have thus far seemed more focused on adapting gaming franchises into highly consumable mass-market blockbusters than trying to do anything bold or that might add perceived friction to the audience’s experience of what’s taking place onscreen.
So far at least, Shigeru Miyamoto has trained fans to expect lots of nods to classic Zelda gameplay, like Link breaking pots or bombing cracks in walls, rather than attempts to channel the spirit of Nintendo’s gaming IP into movie adaptations that embody their spirit or transcend it. We’re almost assuredly going to get a quick visual gag where Link glides off a rooftop by holding onto a chicken. But will he be muttering things like “early bird gets the rupee” under his breath while he does it?
As long as the Zelda movie can avoid most of the pitfalls of 2009’s live-action adaptation of Dragon Ball, well, I’ll consider it a win.