From Kingdom Hearts to Elden Ring: The Next Wave of Video Game Adaptations

Upcoming adaptations including Kingdom Hearts, Sekiro, Ghost of Tsushima, Death Stranding and Elden Ring could signal a new era for video game adaptations, with bigger ambition, stronger creative teams and far more potential than many projects of the past.

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Video game adaptations have always had a complicated relationship with audiences. It is a little strange when we consider just how popular gaming has become, but at the same time, it is difficult to blame viewers when the final product simply is not good enough. Unfortunately, for many years video game adaptations did not exactly set the bar particularly high. Too often, it felt as if having a recognisable name attached to a film was expected to do most of the work. Take a popular game, spend considerably less than the source material perhaps deserved, and hope that the loyalty players already had towards it would be enough to bring them into cinemas. That attitude has slowly started to change. Recent successes have shown that audiences are not against seeing their favourite games translated to another medium. They simply expect the people behind them to understand what made those games so special and to treat the source material with enough care to make the transition worthwhile. We are still far from being able to say that video game adaptations have completely escaped their reputation, but looking at some of the projects currently on the way, the next few years could become one of the most interesting periods yet for games making the jump to the screen.

Kingdom Hearts The latest gaming franchise to join that list is Kingdom Hearts. Disney officially greenlit an original Kingdom Hearts anime series for Disney Channel and Disney+ on 14 August 2026. Developed alongside franchise creator Tetsuya Nomura and the creative team at Square Enix, the series will not simply recreate one of the games. Instead, it will tell a new story while expanding the existing Kingdom Hearts universe. There is an obvious reason why this could become one of the biggest gaming adaptations currently in development. Disney has resources that very few entertainment companies can match, while Kingdom Hearts already combines Square Enix with some of the most recognisable Disney characters and worlds ever created. Money alone guarantees nothing, but if Disney takes the project seriously, gives the creative team enough resources and understands why people have remained attached to the franchise for more than two decades, the potential is enormous. The decision to tell an original story may also prove to be the right one. Kingdom Hearts has an incredibly complicated mythology, and trying to compress years of games into a television adaptation could easily become a mess. Expanding the universe instead gives the creators considerably more freedom. Sekiro: No Defeat Sekiro: No Defeat is taking a very different approach. Rather than attempting to recreate FromSoftware's world through live action, Sekiro is being turned into a fully hand drawn 2D animated feature film. The production committee has specifically confirmed that the animation is being created by hand and that generative AI is not being used. That does not necessarily mean computers are absent from every part of the modern animation pipeline, but the promise of hand drawn 2D animation without generative AI is already a strong creative statement. It also seems particularly suited to a game with such a distinctive mixture of brutality, movement and traditional Japanese imagery. Kenichi Kutsuna is directing, with Qzil.la handling the animation. Several members of the original Japanese voice cast are also returning, including Daisuke Namikawa as Wolf and Kenjiro Tsuda as Genichiro Ashina. The film begins a three week limited theatrical run in Japan on 4 September 2026. Among the projects on this list, Sekiro may have one of the clearest creative directions. Rather than trying to completely reinvent the source material, the production appears to be leaning directly into its visual identity. Ghost of Tsushima Ghost of Tsushima currently has two screen adaptations connected to the franchise. Sony Pictures and PlayStation Productions first announced a live action movie in 2021, with John Wick director Chad Stahelski attached to direct and Takashi Doscher later brought in to write the screenplay. The project remains active, although Sony has still not given it a clear release date. The second project is an anime inspired by Ghost of Tsushima and its supernatural multiplayer mode, Ghost of Tsushima: Legends. Takanobu Mizuno is directing at Kamikaze Douga, while Gen Urobuchi is handling the story composition. Aniplex, Sony Music, Crunchyroll and PlayStation Productions are also involved, with the series currently scheduled to premiere on Crunchyroll in 2027. For now, the anime appears to have the much clearer route towards release, although that does not mean the live action film has disappeared. The interesting part is that both formats could work for completely different reasons. The original game already owes a great deal to classic samurai cinema, which makes live action a natural direction, while Legends gives the anime room to push much further into mythology, demons and supernatural elements. If both projects eventually make it to the screen, they do not necessarily have to feel like two versions of the same idea. Death Stranding Then there is Death Stranding, perhaps one of the most difficult games imaginable to translate into a conventional film. A24 and Kojima Productions are developing the live action adaptation, with Michael Sarnoski writing and directing. His previous work includes Pig, A Quiet Place: Day One and A24's The Death of Robin Hood. Perhaps the most important decision so far is that the film will not simply recreate Sam Porter Bridges' journey. Sarnoski has confirmed that the adaptation will exist inside the world of Death Stranding but primarily follow a new group of characters, although some familiar faces from the games are expected to appear. As of June 2026, he had submitted the second draft of the screenplay and hoped to begin filming in Iceland and Northern Ireland in 2027. That could be exactly the approach this particular adaptation needs. Trying to compress everything that happens in Death Stranding into a conventional film would be extremely difficult. Kojima's world is strange, complicated and filled with ideas that players discover over dozens of hours. Creating another story inside that universe allows the film to use its concepts without turning itself into a rushed recreation of the game. A24 also seems like an interesting creative home for something this unusual. The studio has built much of its reputation around filmmakers willing to take risks. The question is whether that creative approach can also handle the scale needed to convincingly bring the world of Death Stranding to the screen. Elden Ring If Death Stranding looks difficult to adapt, Elden Ring may be on another level entirely. Bandai Namco and A24 have officially confirmed that Alex Garland will write and direct the live action adaptation, which is currently scheduled for cinemas on 3 March 2028 and is planned for IMAX. Garland's directing work includes Ex Machina, Annihilation, Men and Civil War, while he co directed Warfare with Ray Mendoza. He also has previous experience with gaming, having worked as a writer on Enslaved: Odyssey to the West. Perhaps the biggest question surrounding the project is its scale. According to The Wall Street Journal, the film is expected to cost around $175 million, which would make it an enormous step up for A24 and its most expensive production to date. That combination alone makes Elden Ring one of the most interesting adaptations currently on the horizon. Garland has already shown that he can work with strange worlds, ambitious concepts and stories that do not feel the need to explain everything to the audience, qualities that could fit FromSoftware remarkably well. What neither Garland nor A24 has really attempted before is something on the sheer scale of the Lands Between. A large budget, a respected director and one of the biggest gaming properties of recent years make the project look promising, but they also create enormous expectations. Turning Elden Ring into a film without losing the mystery, atmosphere and sense of scale that made the game what it is will not be an easy task. A New Era for Gaming Adaptations? All of these projects suggest that gaming adaptations may finally be entering a new era, or at the very least that there is a fresh breeze appearing on the horizon. None of these productions guarantees success, and that is important to remember. Money, actors, directors and respected studios can create expectations, but they can never guarantee the final result. Every single adaptation mentioned here could still disappoint. What they do offer, however, is hope and potential, something that video game adaptations have often lacked. Until recently, the successes felt far more sporadic, and at times almost accidental. There were good adaptations, but there was never enough consistency to suggest that the industry had completely understood how to approach gaming as a source of material. Those successes did prove one very important thing though. Video game adaptations are not automatically doomed to fail. The success of projects such as these could open the door to investment on a considerably larger scale, and cinema badly needs new sources of inspiration. Games may not represent completely original ideas when the stories and worlds already exist in another medium, but they remain an almost endless source of characters, locations, mythology and concepts that have barely been explored on film or television. Used intelligently, that could provide cinema with fantastic productions for many years and allow studios to search for new ideas far beyond the franchises they have already recycled again and again. The material is there, the audience is there and increasingly the talent and money are there as well. There are still no guarantees, but perhaps for the first time there is enough happening at the same moment to suggest that the occasional success could become something much bigger. Now we only need to see which side of that divide these upcoming adaptations will land on.

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