A24’s Elden Ring film adaptation reportedly has a production budget of $200 million, which more than doubles the previous highest budget for a movie by the usually indie-focused studio. Scary, but there’s something even scarier casting a shadow over the project.
The chaotic Timothée Chalamet-led Marty Supreme was A24’s biggest-budget movie to date, with $70 million allocated to its production. Those are already impressive enough numbers for a movie about people playing table tennis, but that money was being put into the kind of movie A24 already had vast experience in making.
But the reported $200 million figure for a video game adaptation of a massive period piece that requires heavy visual effects to give moviegoers the type of immersion comparable to that of the game? That’s a whole new beast.
And the budget juggling itself isn’t even what’s scaring me the most. A24 has put out incredible movies in the past, but the studio has been through a very alarming change as of late. A few months ago, A24 infamously signed a deal with Google to develop more AI filmmaking tools, so I would be disappointed but not terribly surprised if Elden Ring ends up affected by that dumb deal.
Moreover, Elden Ring is being directed by Alex Garland, who also directed Civil War for A24. Though you might not remember much about Civil War, it got pretty infamous for a short while because A24 decided to feature a lot of “AI-assisted” movie posters for its promotion, and they sucked incredibly.
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Not only did they feature a bunch of obvious mistakes, such as historical buildings morphed into things that made no sense or soldiers of impossible size, but they also depicted various scenes that had absolutely nothing to do with the events of the movie.
Though the final cut ended up featuring no usage of genAI, and Garland’s involvement in the decision to feature genAI for Civil War’s promotional campaign is unknown, these connections can’t help but feel like a possible bad omen in an adaptation of a game that already features so many omens.
In the end, even if the movie turns out to feature no genAI at all, it sucks if we spend the entire movie-going experience worried about whether we gave money to people who willingly used tech that scraped the work from other artists in a way that both destroys the environment and creates mediocre visuals. Here’s hoping studios don’t live in a bubble and read reports on the catastrophic results of companies pivoting to AI.
