Alex Garland’s live-action adaptation of Elden Ring is officially in production, A24 and Bandai Namco Entertainment announced this week.
The film is set for release on March 3, 2028, it is being shot in IMAX, and it is the most expensive and most ambitious project A24 has ever made.
Kit Connor is confirmed as the lead. The full cast has been revealed. Filming has begun in the United Kingdom, including Scotland.
The announcement confirms what had been building since May 2025, when A24 first announced the project with Garland attached to write and direct.
Connor was in talks for the lead role at that point. Cailee Spaeny entered talks in July 2025.
Both are now officially confirmed, alongside Ben Whishaw, who joins as the third lead. The rest of the ensemble has been filled out with a cast that suggests Garland is building something with genuine scale.
Who Else Is In The Cast?
Kit Connor takes the lead role. Connor broke internationally as Nick Nelson in Netflix’s Heartstopper, the show that turned him into one of the most talked-about young British actors of his generation.
That show is ending this year with a film. Before it does, Connor has already moved well beyond it, he starred in Garland’s 2025 war film Warfare, also for A24, and described working with the director as “creatively fulfilling, he brings out your best.”
That relationship is the direct thread that runs from Warfare to this. Garland wanted him. Connor wanted to do it. Both needed the scheduling to work out.
Ben Whishaw is the kind of casting that tells you something about a director’s intentions.
Whishaw is not an obvious blockbuster name, he is a formally precise, emotionally intelligent actor best known for playing Q in the Daniel Craig James Bond films and for voicing Paddington Bear, neither of which requires him to anchor a large fantasy film.
Casting him in a major role suggests Garland is more interested in the interior texture of these characters than in spectacle for its own sake.
Cailee Spaeny rounds out the three leads. She and Garland have already worked together, she starred in Civil War, which was the previous holder of the title of A24’s most expensive production before being passed by Marty Supreme last year.
She knows how Garland works and what he is after.
Beyond the three leads, the full ensemble includes Tom Burke, Havana Rose Liu, Sonoya Mizuno, Jonathan Pryce, Ruby Cruz, Nick Offerman, John Hodgkinson, Jefferson Hall, Emma Laird and Peter Serafinowicz. Sonoya Mizuno is another Garland regular, she appeared in Ex Machina, his first film as a director, over a decade ago.
Jonathan Pryce brings the kind of authority that comes from The Two Popes and The Crown.
Nick Offerman’s presence in any ensemble tends to anchor the human scale of whatever world it is set in. Jefferson Hall will be familiar to anyone who watched House of the Dragon.
Emma Laird appeared in 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple. The cast is deep and it is British-heavy, which is consistent with where the film is shooting and consistent with Garland’s instincts as a filmmaker.
Who Is Alex Garland?
Alex Garland is an English writer and director whose career has been built on adaptations and genre material handled with more intelligence than the genre typically receives.
He wrote 28 Days Later, one of the defining horror films of the early 2000s. Garland wrote 28 Weeks Later and the script that became Sunshine.
As a director he made Ex Machina, which remains one of the best science fiction films of the past twenty years, then Annihilation, Civil War, and most recently Warfare, the war film he co-directed with Ray Mendoza that Connor starred in.
His connection to Elden Ring began with the game itself. Garland is a longtime gamer and a genuine fan of FromSoftware’s work.
According to the development history, he shared his experience playing Elden Ring with A24’s head of film Noah Sacco, who was sufficiently convinced that Sacco flew Garland to Japan to sign a deal directly with FromSoftware.
Garland came to those meetings with a 160-page spec script and forty pages of visual references.
He had already done the work before anyone officially gave him the job. That level of preparation is unusual and it explains why A24 committed to making this their largest production.
What Is The Elden Ring Video Game?
Elden Ring was released on February 25, 2022, developed by FromSoftware under the direction of Hidetaka Miyazaki.
The world-building was created by George R.R. Martin, the author of A Song of Ice and Fire, the book series that became Game of Thrones, who is also executive producing the film.
The combination of Miyazaki’s game design sensibility and Martin’s mythology produced something that sold over 30 million copies worldwide and received more than 400 Game of the Year awards. It is one of the most critically acclaimed video games ever made.
The game is set in a dark fantasy world called the Lands Between. The story follows a Tarnished warrior attempting to restore the shattered Elden Ring by defeating bosses and reclaiming its fragments, with the goal of becoming the new Elden Lord.
The narrative is deliberately sparse, it is told through environmental detail, conversations with non-player characters, and item descriptions rather than cutscenes or exposition.
That approach to storytelling is both what makes the game singular and what makes adapting it genuinely complicated.
There is no central, linear plot to lift from the source material. Garland will need to build one, using the mythology and the world rather than the game’s specific structure.
A24 Makes A Big Bet On Elden Ring
This is A24’s most expensive and ambitious project ever made. The studio built its reputation on mid-budget prestige films, A24 is the label behind Everything Everywhere All At Once, Hereditary, The Witch, Midsommar, Moonlight, and has been scaling up deliberately.
Civil War pushed the ceiling. Marty Supreme, Timothée Chalamet’s ping pong film, passed it and grossed $180 million worldwide, setting a studio record.
Elden Ring is expected to surpass both, drawing on a game that has one of the most devoted fanbases in the history of the medium.
The decision to shoot in IMAX reflects that ambition. IMAX commitments are expensive and logistically demanding, they signal that A24 intends for this to be a theatrical event rather than a film that happens to be in theaters.
The Lands Between, the dark fantasy world at the center of Elden Ring, is visually extraordinary in the game, and the scale of shooting in Scotland and across the UK suggests Garland is building that world practically rather than relying on digital environments.
The film opens March 3, 2028, into a release calendar that already includes a Pixar original and the final Fast and Furious film.
None of that will matter if Garland delivers what the 160 pages and forty images suggested he had in mind when he flew to Japan to ask for the rights.
