Mario Bautista
Haley Joel Osment, known for a range of roles from The Sixth Sense to Sora in Kingdom Hearts, wants a role in Nintendo’s Legend of Zelda movie. Like, really wants a role.
Osment expressed his desire to join the Zelda movie cast during a recent IGN show after he played a small portion of Ocarina of Time, widely considered one of the best Zelda games around. He asked if anyone was ever going to make a Zelda movie. IGN told him Nintendo is, indeed, already working on it and asked whether he’d be keen to show up in the project.
“Oh, my hat’s in the ring, they know my hat’s been in the ring,” Osment said. “Link was like 37 when he did all this, right!? 17, 37? As a kid, I was like, ‘obviously they’re gonna make [Ocarina of Time] a movie soon, the story’s all written out for you!’ And you’re like, ‘that’d be very challenging to make into a compelling two-hour movie.'”
Osment said he’d love to see Ocarina of Time and Majora’s Mask lore show up in the film in some capacity and called the two games his “original Star Wars [trilogy]” in terms of the impact they had on him at the time.
Nintendo, Sony, and Arad Productions said production had already begun when they announced the Zelda movie in November 2023, though whether that includes casting or even a finished script is up in the air. Maybe Osment will get his wish after all.
If Nintendo takes a similar approach to the Zelda movie that they did with the Mario movie, though, we’ll probably see an original story with small references here and there to previous Zelda moments and not a straight-up adaptation.
It certainly worked for the Super Mario Bros. film. That adaptation grossed over $1 billion in theaters alone and broke box office records around the world.
