The Elden Ring movie just set a studio record before audiences have seen a single frame of it. A new Wall Street Journal report puts A24’s adaptation of the FromSoftware phenomenon at nearly $200 million, making it the most expensive project in the company’s history — and the number surfaced, of all places, in a WSJ piece about a different film entirely, one profiling the studio’s rise.
How Big a Leap Is This for A24?
For context on just how far outside A24’s usual lane this is: the studio’s previous most expensive release was Marty Supreme, with a budget of around $70 million — which itself surpassed Civil War at about $50 million. Elden Ring nearly triples that record. As Insider Gaming notes, the relatively young FromSoftware franchise is seeing a strikingly quick turnaround on screen: the game only launched in February 2022, and it has already sold over 36 million copies across Steam, PlayStation, and Xbox.
The WSJ report frames the budget as proof of how far A24 has come — the studio is now a major player that rivals are actively trying to copy. Online horror properties that seem like they could become the next “Backrooms” have sparked multimillion-dollar bidding wars, and Universal is backing a big-budget movie from the Everything Everywhere directors. “They’re a Goldilocks company. Just the right amount of people doing just the right amount of things,” Julie Huntsinger, the Telluride director, told the paper.
Garland, a 2028 Date, and a Very Good Cast
The film itself has a March 3, 2028 release date, and per The Hollywood Reporter, Alex Garland will write and direct — the same filmmaker who wrote and directed Civil War. The cast includes Kit Connor, Tom Burke, Rose Liu, and Nick Offerman, among others, and production is expected to take about 100 days of principal photography. (Offerman, apparently unable to get enough of video game adaptations, has also signed on for the fourth Sonic the Hedgehog film.)
It’s a bet that makes sense on paper. Much of Elden Ring’s world-building and characters were written by Song of Ice and Fire author George R.R. Martin, and as DualShockers notes, the Lands Between is arguably the most lived-in of all the Souls settings — prime material for an alternate-media adaptation. A24 has also earned some benefit of the doubt with its treatment of existing properties: its patience with The Backrooms‘ first-time director, Kane Parsons, is credited as a large reason this film stands so strongly. DualShockers also points to Garland’s screenplay credit on Dredd — a box-office lightweight that nonetheless captured its source material’s feel perfectly — as a reason for confidence that he can put a larger audience inside the Lands Between.
Still, $200 million is a massive gamble for a studio whose experience is in smaller-scale films — one that makes clear A24 has been stacking the deck over the course of years. The good news for FromSoftware faithful: the studio has been remarkably tight-lipped about the project, which in A24’s case usually means they’re protecting something worth protecting.