Craft, production, and the journey from screenplay to screen.
Video Game Movies Are Booming. Here Is How Writers Get In
A $200 million bet just landed on the film market, and it is attached to a video game. A24 is bringing Alex Garland's Elden Ring adaptation to the American Film Market carrying a reported budget between $175 million and $200 million, which would make it the most expensive standalone project ever offered at a film or television market.
Here is the direct answer for writers: video game adaptations have become the biggest new buying lane in the business, and studios are hunting for writers who can do this specific job. The Garland deal is the clearest signal yet of what that job looks like, and it looks like this: know the world cold, write the script on spec, and build the story the game only implies.
What the Elden Ring deal signals
Start with the scale, because the scale is the story. The $175 to $200 million figure comes from Deadline's reporting, with sources placing it closer to the upper end. For context, A24's previous budget record belonged to Marty Supreme at a reported $60 to $70 million. Before that, Civil War held the title at $50 million and grossed $127 million worldwide, a genuine win. In one move, Garland and A24 have roughly tripled the studio's ceiling. A24 is fully financing the film itself.
The market has already responded. Amazon MGM Studios pre-emptively secured international pay-one streaming rights in a deal described as worth tens of millions of dollars, before a single AFM conversation began. A24 handles North American theatrical, and the film reaches HBO Max in the US through A24's existing output deal. It is in post-production now, shot in IMAX, and set for theaters on March 3, 2028, with Kit Connor, Ben Whishaw, and Cailee Spaeny leading the cast.
The property earns the bet. Elden Ring, developed by FromSoftware and released in 2022, was directed by Hidetaka Miyazaki with worldbuilding by George R. R. Martin, who is also producing the film. It has sold more than 30 million copies and won Game of the Year at The Game Awards 2022. The fanbase is global, literate in the mythology, and demonstrably willing to pay for new entries in the world.
Why Garland got the job
This is the part writers should study, because it is a career blueprint.
Garland did not get hired off a slate of similar credits. He made a personal pitch to A24's head of film, Noah Sacco, drawing on his own experience as a player of the game. Sacco then flew with him to Japan to close the deal with FromSoftware directly. A writer-director lobbying a studio out of personal passion, not a studio assigning IP to a hired hand.
Then Garland did the oldest thing in the business: he wrote the script. His screenplay runs to at least 180 pages including visuals, written on spec before production began. He is writing and directing alone.
Three lessons sit inside that sequence. First, the writer who knows the world wins the room. Garland's authority came from hundreds of hours inside the game, not from a take document. Second, passion is a credential when the IP owner can feel it. FromSoftware said yes to a player. Third, the spec still works. At every budget level, including $200 million, a great script written on nobody's orders remains the most persuasive object in Hollywood.
What the adaptation job actually is
Here is the craft problem, and it is harder than it looks. A game's defining quality is rarely its plot in the film sense. Elden Ring's power is the oppressive, fragmented density of its world, the way meaning accrues through exploration rather than exposition. There is no three act structure to lift. The writer has to build the narrative the game implies but never states.
That is the job across the whole category. Lore is not story. A wiki page of mythology is raw material, not a screenplay. The adaptation writer's work is deciding what the game is really about underneath the lore, giving the protagonist a want the game never needed to state, and turning atmosphere into causation. It is the same muscle as adapting a book, with one difference: the source audience has lived inside the world and will know instantly if you have not.
The fanbase cuts both ways. Thirty million players is a built-in audience most original films would kill for. It is also thirty million fact checkers. The writers thriving in this lane treat the community's knowledge as the floor, not the ceiling: honor what they know, then surprise them with what the story means.
How writers break into the lane
- Play the games. Not trailers, not wikis. The authority Garland carried into the room came from lived experience with the material, and IP owners can tell the difference.
- Write the spec. An adaptation sample, even of a property you will never get hired for, proves you can do the specific job: find the film inside the lore.
- Know the business shape. Game adaptations are financed like tentpoles and sold like franchises. Understand what a pay-one deal is, what a market like AFM does, and where the writer sits in that chain. Our guide to how writers sell a script covers the deal mechanics.
- Start where the bar is lower. Not every game adaptation is $200 million. Streaming series, animated features, and mid budget genre films all need the same skill set, and the credits compound.
- Lead with the logline. "A Tarnished warrior crosses a shattered realm to claim a broken ring" is a premise anyone can grasp in one sentence, gamer or not. If the concept needs the lore to make sense, it is not ready.
Where GREENLIGHT fits
This is exactly the kind of moment GREENLIGHT's adaptation feature was built for. The market is hungry for stories in every form, and most of those stories are sitting in drawers, not in screenplay format. GREENLIGHT closes that gap.
Here is how it works. Bring the story in the form you already have: a comic, a short story, a full novel, even a single image. GREENLIGHT converts it into screenplay formatting, scene by scene, without rewriting your story. No invented dialogue, no added plot, no AI authorship. Every element is tagged with where it came from, so you can always see what was observed and what you decided. Then you take over: the adaptation is organized into chapter blocks you reorder, move, or cut to choose the film's structure, and you get a first look production footprint, a budget range and shooting days, computed from your structure.
For images it goes one step further. Describe what you see in a photo, a sketch, a comic panel. GREENLIGHT asks the questions, you make the decisions, and those decisions become scene material. Nothing is invented from the pixels. The pipeline runs image to observation to question to your decision to story. The creator edits the story. Always.
And this is not only for screenwriters. If you are a novelist, your book becomes a screenplay you can put in front of the industry through the platform. If you write comics or short stories, your work enters the film world in its proper format without you learning formatting from scratch. If you are holding one powerful image, that image can become the seed of a scene. Any writer with a story in another form now has a door into film, with their story intact and their name on every decision.
Adaptation is a craft discipline, and craft can be studied. GREENLIGHT's Academy teaches the mechanics underneath it: structure, character want, and how to find the story inside source material that was never built as a story. The creator owns the story throughout, including the ones based on someone else's world.
The market is telling writers exactly what it wants. Thirty million players are waiting to see if somebody can put their world on a screen. Somebody who has played it, loves it, and wrote the script anyway is the somebody.
FAQ
Do I need to be a gamer to write game adaptations?
You need to know the specific world cold, which in practice means playing it. Garland's pitch worked because he was a genuine player, not because he had a theory about games. IP owners choose writers they believe will protect the world. Fluency is the proof.
Is game adaptation just fan service?
The failed ones are. The job is not transcribing lore, it is finding the film the lore implies: a protagonist with a want, stakes that escalate, a theme the game never stated outright. Fans reward the adaptation that understands the world deeply enough to surprise them inside it.
What if the game has almost no story?
That is often an advantage. A thin plot with a rich world gives the writer room to build. The danger is the opposite: mistaking mythology for narrative and delivering two hours of exposition. The question is always the writer's question, what does the character want, and the game cannot answer it for you.
Is this lane only for established writers?
The credits help, but the mechanism is open: the spec. Garland wrote at least 180 pages on his own initiative. A writer with no credits and a brilliant adaptation sample has something concrete to put in front of people. The work proves the writer.
Sources
- Kynari, "A24's Elden Ring Is the Most Expensive Film Ever Offered at a Rights Market," October 28, 2026, reporting Deadline's budget and screenplay figures: https://www.kynari.io/a24-elden-ring-afm-amazon-mgm-budget-record-alex-garland/
- WCCFTech, "Elden Ring Movie's Reported $175-200 Million Budget Makes It the Biggest Standalone Film Ever Offered at a Rights Market," October 27, 2026: https://wccftech.com/elden-ring-movie-reported-175-200-million-budget-biggest-standalone-film-rights-market/
- ComicBasics, "A24's Elden Ring Movie Is Shaping Up as a Marathon Fantasy Epic," October 2026: https://www.comicbasics.com/a24s-elden-ring-movie-is-shaping-up-as-a-marathon-fantasy-epic-and-the-script-alone-is-massive/
Write the movie. Understand the movie. Plan the movie. Sell the script.
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