There are often people (though few have populated this thread) who insist that a Zelda movie would not work because film adaptations of other franchises have failed.
The first thing to point out is that plenty of games have been successfully adapted into shows. There's Pokemon, of course, and a couple of seasons of that have been good (the black/white adaptation is the best by far, in my opinion). Tales of Symphonia and Tales of Phantasia both have widely-lauded OVAs. Even Sonic the Hedgehog had a decent show in the early 90s SATAM series. And to boot, you have to admit that at least Pokemon the Movie 2000 did the world of the games justice.
I'll add this. I absolutely despised FF7: Advent Children. I've never played much FF7 and don't give a damn about any of the characters, but as a movie viewer, I thought it was an atrocious mess. But it made a lot of fans happy, so maybe even a bad Zelda movie wouldn't offend too many people.
Secondly, Zelda has been successfully adapted into manga. Whatever you think about them, they weren't bad.
So the idea of an adaptation itself is not problematic. It's a question of how they do it. There are two approaches they could take: adapting one of the games or filling in some plot with a movie about other moments in Hyrule's history. Both could work.
For example, they could explore the time before Skyward Sword's Link, or the flood, or perhaps pivotal moments we haven't heard of. Link and Zelda wouldn't need to be characters, but they could be. This could expand the world of Hyrule if it was canon, and if it weren't canon, it would at least be an interesting diversion that gave us a look at the world from a different perspective.
Adapting a game may be a better place to start. The two games that really stand out to me as ripe for adaptation are Ocarina of Time and The Wind Waker. Both have absolutely perfect presentation and a great story, but also leave enough room to
adapt, to move things around, collapse characters, add some things and subtract others. Both also have a visual style with the sort of immediacy and expressiveness that a film would require. Imagine a movie that looked like the official art from The Wind Waker, with the smoothness of the in-game animation! Both also place the focus on Link and his character growth first and foremost, which lends them more focus, but both also manage to infuse their worlds with a great deal of culture and variety. They're also "classic" Zelda stories.
An adaptation would obviously have to change things. Link would probably have to accumulate some friends, not much time could be spent on dungeons or item collection, and the plot would have to consistently move forward. This would apply whether the adaptation were a movie or a show--the latter of which isn't discussed enough, in my opinion, even though it may be even better for the Zelda franchise.
In any case, I'd love to see an adaptation that preserved the sense of adventure, the characterizations, the humor, and the style of the Zelda series. If you want to see how it can be done, just look at the Ocarina of Time manga, which isn't really my cup of tea but does a good job preserving much of what makes that game's story so good.
I saw the IGN trailer for The Legend of Zelda. I was greatly disappointed to find it was jus a April fools joke! It looked real and looked really good. I would definitely go see it (and I know a lot of ppl who would as well) if it was a movie.
The IGN trailer was a nice curiosity, but I didn't think it was very good (I saw it on April 1st, so I knew it was a joke--I didn't mind it). It looked like another modern epic with less spectacular production values. One problem is that it was live-action. I don't think it would be impossible to make a good live-action adaptation, but I wouldn't want to see that, and what would be the point? I think that would drive an unnecessary wedge between it and the games' intensely unrealistic (I daresay Japanese) style, which would make it less of a quality adaptation and more of an interpretation. Why go for something as boring as real actors and sets when a couple of the games look like they're inspired by Miyazaki? Secondly, it just seemed too serious. I liked the trailer for
The Last Airbender, but my God, was the movie awful. There are several reasons for that, but one of the major ones should have been evident from the trailer: there's a tendency, in a compressed timeframe, to make things overly serious. It's easier, and certain styles lend themselves to that sort of presentation.
Unfortunately, nothing about the trailer's style echoed the nuances of the game. There wasn't much real charm or mystery, just sound and fury, signifying nothing.
I'm of the belief that, barring something like Pixar (fat chance), Japanese production studios would be more adept at capturing those nuances, since it is a product of that culture.