Recently there’s been movement at Nintendo who appears to be finally softening a decades-long hardline stance against seeing their valuable IP like Mario, StarFox, Metroid or Zelda being adapted for film or TV.
The failure of the disastrous “Super Mario Bros.” movie in 1993 led to Nintendo shutting down any possibility of further adaptations. Recently they began to come back around with an animated Mario movie on the way from the folks at Illumination Entertainment.
Several years ago though, Nintendo was reportedly considering a live-action Netflix series based on “The Legend of Zelda” property – an adaptation that never got out of development and was abruptly cancelled.
This week, Eurogamer reported that comedian Adam Conover appeared on The Serf Times podcast recently and revealed that he was working on a claymation animated “StarFox” adaptation back around the same time the “Zelda” series was in early development.
However, when The Wall Street Journal leaked word about the “Zelda” series Nintendo abruptly halted all of its adaptations shortly after:
“I worked at College Humour and we had a secret project where we were going to make a claymation version of StarFox with Nintendo. I know this because Shigeru Miyamoto came to our office…
Then, a month later, suddenly there were reports Netflix wasn’t going to do its Legend of Zelda anymore. I was like ‘what happened?’ And then I heard from my boss we weren’t doing our StarFox anymore. I was like ‘what happened?’. He was like, ‘someone at Netflix leaked the Legend of Zelda thing, they weren’t supposed to talk about it, Nintendo freaked out… and they pulled the plug on everything, the entire programme to adapt these things.”
Should the Illumination film fares well, Nintendo may become a bit more liberal with its adaptations though is unlikely to simply allow any old property of filmmaker to have a go at filming their works.