In the spring of 2025, Alex Garland flew to Japan. He had written 160 pages. He asked for a meeting with Hidetaka Miyazaki, the notoriously private creator of Elden Ring, and presented his vision for what a film adaptation of the game could be. Miyazaki approved it. That meeting is, to my mind, the most telling detail in the entire story of how this film came to exist. Garland did not wait to be approached. He went to Japan with a finished draft and made the case in person.
The result is one of the most anticipated productions in recent memory. Elden Ring sold more than 30 million copies after its release in February 2022, won Game of the Year, and built a global community of players who engaged with its fragmented, elliptical mythology with an intensity that most blockbuster films would envy. Adapting it for cinema was always going to be a significant undertaking. The question was whether anyone would attempt it with genuine artistic ambition rather than as a franchise play.
Garland's involvement answers that question. His track record -- Ex Machina, Annihilation, Civil War, Warfare -- is the track record of a filmmaker who treats unsettling environments and moral ambiguity as his natural territory. What interests me as a historian is where he chose to film it. Because the locations chosen for the Welsh portion of the production are not generic medieval backdrops. They are specific places with specific histories that align, in ways that feel almost too precise, with the themes of the game itself.
What is the Elden Ring Movie?
The Elden Ring film is a live-action adaptation of FromSoftware's 2022 action role-playing game, produced by A24 and Bandai Namco Filmworks. Alex Garland wrote the screenplay and is directing. The game's world was built around a mythology written by George R.R. Martin, who is executive producing the film alongside Andrew Macdonald and Allon Reich from DNA Films, and Peter Rice.
The story centres on the Lands Between, a dark fantasy world where the Elden Ring -- a powerful artefact governing the natural order -- has been shattered. Its fragments were claimed by the demigod children of the goddess Marika, each corrupted by the power they hold. Into this fractured world come the Tarnished, exiled outcasts summoned back to reassemble the Ring and become the new Elden Lord.
Set photos from the London production at Greenwich Naval College show prop boxes labelled Leyndell Streets and Stormveil, confirming that Leyndell -- the Royal Capital at the base of the Erdtree -- and Stormveil Castle, stronghold of the demigod Godrick the Grafted, will both appear in the film. The Academy of Raya Lucaria is also indicated by the props visible on set. The scale of the production is evident: hundreds of extras in medieval attire, fog machines, green screens for the Erdtree, and a crew of hundreds.
The Cast: Who is in the Elden Ring Film?
The lead cast was confirmed in April 2026. Kit Connor, best known for Heartstopper and Garland's own Warfare, takes the central role. Cailee Spaeny, who appeared in Garland's Civil War and more recently in Alien: Romulus, is confirmed alongside Ben Whishaw, the Oscar-nominated actor known for his roles as Q in the Bond films, Paddington, and Black Doves.
The supporting cast is equally striking. Tom Burke, Nick Offerman, Havana Rose Liu, Sonoya Mizuno -- a Garland regular from Ex Machina -- Jonathan Pryce, Ruby Cruz, Emma Laird, Peter Serafinowicz, and Jefferson Hall have all been confirmed. Character assignments have not been officially disclosed, though industry speculation links Whishaw to the scholarly mage Sorcerer Rogier and Spaeny to a Maiden character aligned with Melina.
What strikes me about this cast is that Garland has assembled performers associated with psychological complexity rather than action spectacle. Connor, Whishaw, and Spaeny are not conventional blockbuster leads. They are actors whose work tends toward interiority and moral ambiguity -- precisely the register that Elden Ring's lore demands.
Filming in Wales: The Locations and What They Represent
The Welsh leg of the production centred on three locations in Eryri (Snowdonia), all managed by Cadw and all closed to the public for the duration of filming.
Conwy Castle was the first to close, from 15 May to 24 May 2026, with active filming on 21 and 22 May. Online speculation linked Conwy specifically to either Castle Morne or Stormveil Castle from the game -- the latter being one of the most iconic locations in Elden Ring, a clifftop fortress of decayed grandeur presiding over a conquered landscape. Conwy's eight drum towers, intact curtain walls, and position above the river estuary make it one of the few locations in Europe that can project that quality on camera without extensive digital augmentation.
Dolbadarn Castle in Llanberis closed from 21 to 31 May. Built by Llywelyn the Great in the early 13th century, it is a very different proposition from Conwy. Where Conwy is imperial and symmetrical, Dolbadarn is intimate and ambiguous -- a round tower above a glacial lake, built not by a conqueror but by a Welsh prince asserting sovereignty in the only way available to him. It is a castle that already reads as ancient and defeated. Its most famous occupant was Owain Goch ap Gruffudd, imprisoned in the tower for over twenty years by his own brother. That biography -- betrayal, imprisonment, abandonment -- maps onto the game's themes with uncomfortable precision.
The third location was Dinorwig Quarry, the vast slate quarry above Llanberis, which closed for filming from 26 to 29 May. The scale of Dinorwig is extraordinary: terraced into the mountainside across a kilometre of slate, it is simultaneously industrial and prehistoric in its visual register. For sequences requiring a landscape of shattered, otherworldly grandeur, there is arguably no location in Britain that competes with it.
Alex Garland and the Game He Loves
What separates this adaptation from the majority of video game films is the nature of Garland's engagement with the source material. He is, by multiple accounts, a genuine fan. He did not take the project because of commercial logic. He sought it out, wrote the script on his own initiative, and flew to Japan to present it to Miyazaki directly.
That matters because Elden Ring is a game that resists conventional narrative adaptation. Its story is not told linearly. Information is embedded in item descriptions, environmental details, and NPC dialogue fragments that the player pieces together over dozens of hours. There is no protagonist in the conventional sense. The Tarnished is a blank vessel through whom the player explores a world whose history is already over.
Garland's solution -- to construct a screenplay from that fragmented lore rather than simply dramatise the gameplay -- is the only approach that could work. His previous films demonstrate the relevant skills: Ex Machina builds an entire philosophical argument from three characters in a confined space; Annihilation constructs dread from environmental accumulation rather than plot mechanics. Both are exactly the skills required for an Elden Ring adaptation with genuine artistic ambition.
The Wider Production: London, Scotland, and Iceland
Wales is one part of a production that spans multiple countries. Principal photography began in April 2026 at Greenwich Naval College in South London, which was transformed into a foggy medieval thoroughfare standing in for sequences in Leyndell, the Royal Capital. The production covered the site in dry ice and smoke to recreate the perpetual overcast atmosphere of the Lands Between.
Filming also extended across England and Scotland, with Iceland confirmed for summer 2026 sequences. The Iceland scenes are likely to represent the more elemental, geological landscapes of the game -- the Crumbling Farum Azula, perhaps, or the windswept heights of the Mountaintops of the Giants. George R.R. Martin's earlier collaboration with HBO on Game of Thrones used Iceland extensively for similar reasons, and Martin's executive producer role here suggests familiarity with what that landscape can do on film.
The budget is confirmed at over $100 million and the production is scheduled across approximately 100 days. For context, that is a serious literary film budget rather than a Marvel-scale production -- large enough to do justice to the game's visual ambitions, disciplined enough to require real locations rather than volume stages.
What This Means for Welsh Tourism
The local response to the filming in North Wales has been broadly positive, with one commentator noting that Game of Thrones doubled Northern Ireland's tourist spend after filming there. The parallel is apt. Game of Thrones transformed locations like the Dark Hedges and Castle Ward in County Down into international pilgrimage sites. Conwy, Dolbadarn, and Dinorwig have the potential to achieve the same effect for North Wales.
It is worth pausing on the deeper irony here. The castles that Edward I built to make Welsh resistance impossible -- the instruments of conquest that George R.R. Martin drew on when constructing the power structures of Westeros -- are now being used to film a story about fractured kingdoms and the corrupting nature of power. If you want to understand why those themes resonate so deeply, the comparison between Tywin Lannister and Edward I is a useful place to start.
Cadw's decision to close the castles for commercial hire reflects an understanding of this dynamic. The short-term cost of closure -- measured in lost visitor revenue over a matter of days -- is negligible against the long-term benefit of international exposure in a film released in IMAX to a global audience of tens of millions. When the Elden Ring film releases in March 2028, audiences who recognise Conwy's towers or Dolbadarn's round keep will want to visit. That is a form of cultural promotion that cannot be purchased at any price.
For anyone planning a visit to either castle before the film releases, both sites are expected to be fully open from June 2026.
This article is part of the Castles in Wales series. Explore all articles at historiesandcastles.com/blogs/castles-in-wales.
