UPDATE: Well, it figures that a project like this is always too good to be true. It turns out that Season Zero was right about there being a Zelda pilot at Amazon, but it's got nothing to do with the video game series, and it's actually about the novelist Zelda Fitzgerald, to be played by Christina Ricci.
Original story: Hey, listen! It looks like Navi is flying around trying to get everyone to pay attention, and for once, that damned little fairy might have something good to say. Earlier this year, it seemed like The Legend of Zelda might end up getting a live-action TV series on Netflix, but that news was shot down almost immediately after it was announced. Now it looks like the project might be up and running again (like Epona), but it will have a new home. We’re taking it with a grain of salt, but we’re still pretty excited.
According to the pilot-knowledgeable website Season Zero, The Legend of Zelda won’t be involved with Netflix anymore (if it ever actually was), but will instead be developed as a pilot for Amazon, which has been putting together pilot seasons for the past couple of years as a way of vetting projects. Should this be true, it will go into production this August, with location shoots happening in New York and Savannah, Georgia.
It’s unclear what the Zelda pilot would actually be about, although we can easily assume that it would involve Link traveling across Hyrule and other areas on a quest to save Princess Zelda, with a big boss battle with Ganondorf happening at some point. A lot of the details in the Zelda games through the years have changed, but the overall plots remain the same, and I can’t see any TV series altering things too much.
If all goes according to plan, the Zelda pilot would join the upcoming batch that are being considered for an early 2016 release, perhaps to coincide with the Wii U game that has yet to become official. Those will include Guillermo del Toro’s long-gestating steampunk fantasy Carnival Row, Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Diego Luna-starring drama Casanova, David E. Kelley’s legal drama Trial, Shane Black’s violent western Edge and possibly Sneaky Pete, the former CBS project from Bryan Cranston and David Shore. There’s also that Woody Allen project that he apparently already hates.
After it was first announced that a Zelda series was heading to Netflix, Nintendo CEO Satoru Iwata said that he had nothing new to share as far as the company’s properties went, but confirmed that news from that report was not based on current facts. So perhaps the wrong part of that was Netflix being behind it and not Amazon.
At this point, Amazon Prime subscribers can look forward to pilots coming later this year such as Shield creator Shawn Ryan’s darkly comedic thriller Mad Dogs, the Philip K. Dick adaptation The Man in the High Castle, the Ben Watkins-created drama Hand of God with Ron Perlman, and the 1980s-set coming of age comedy Red Oaks. All of these had particularly great pilots, so hopefully we’ll get more series on par with Transparent. And if we happen to get a Legend of Zelda series next year, that’ll be amazing as well.
