The American Film Market has seen big packages before. It has never seen anything like this. According to Deadline, A24 is bringing Alex Garland's Elden Ring adaptation to AFM carrying a production budget that sources peg between $175 million and $200 million — "but closer to the latter." That figure makes it the most expensive standalone project ever offered at a film or television market. It also makes it the most expensive film A24 has ever financed, by a margin that is not close.
Official trailerTo understand how rupturing that number is, trace the studio's own budget history. Civil War (2024), Garland's last solo feature for A24, cost $50 million and was, at the time, the studio's most expensive production. It grossed $127 million worldwide — a genuine win that proved A24 could compete in the mid-budget action space. Then came Marty Supreme (2025), which reportedly cost between $60 and $70 million, nudging the studio's ceiling upward. Now, in one move, Garland and A24 have tripled that ceiling. The previous record-holder for most expensive A24 film cost roughly a third of what Elden Ring reportedly does. These are not incremental steps. This is a category change.
Amazon Closes the Most Important Question Before the Market Opens
When a film this large arrives at a sales market, the first question every territorial buyer asks is the same: who else is in? The answer here is already significant. Amazon MGM Studios has pre-emptively secured international pay-one streaming rights in a deal described as worth tens of millions of dollars, covering a large international footprint and removing those territories from the competitive pool before a single conversation begins at AFM. That deal also carries a potential extension into Amazon's Twitch platform — a detail that signals how the acquisition is being framed internally at Amazon, not purely as a prestige drama pick-up but as an activatable franchise asset tied to the gaming world from which the source material comes.
The Amazon pact is structurally significant in a way that goes beyond its dollar value. It means A24 walked into AFM having already answered the streaming question for international markets, which is precisely the question that most concerns territories looking at a $175–200 million fantasy film from an indie distributor without a studio's global infrastructure. The deal functions as a confidence signal. It de-risks the project for theatrical buyers who remain on the table: what they are buying is not a speculative bet on A24's reach, but a theatrical window on a film that a major streaming operator has already committed to at scale.
In the United States, the picture lands differently. Elden Ring is set to eventually arrive on HBO Max per A24's existing US pay-one output deal, keeping domestic streaming in the Warner Bros. Discovery orbit. A24 is fully financing the production, which means every rights deal negotiated at AFM and beyond is pure recoupment against a cost base the studio holds entirely on its own books.
The Garland-A24 Axis at Maximum Extension
The choice of director is not a surprise, but the logic behind it is worth examining precisely because it is the kind of logic that produces $200 million bets. Garland reportedly made a personal pitch to A24's head of film, Noah Sacco, drawing on his own experience as a player of the game, before Sacco flew him to Japan to sign a deal with FromSoftware directly. That origin story — a writer-director lobbying a studio based on personal passion rather than studio-mandated IP development — is very A24, even if the budget that resulted is very much not. Garland then wrote a spec script running to at least 180 pages, including visuals, before production began in the UK earlier this year. He is writing and directing alone. The film is currently in post-production and is scheduled to open in theaters and IMAX on March 3, 2028.
The cast assembled around that script is the most expensive ensemble Garland has worked with. Kit Connor, Ben Whishaw, and Cailee Spaeny lead the film, joined by Tom Burke, Havana Rose Liu, Sonoya Mizuno, Jonathan Pryce, Ruby Cruz, Nick Offerman, Emma Laird, and Peter Serafinowicz. The production was shot in IMAX with cinematographer David J. Thompson, and production designers Mark Digby and Michelle Day. Several of these collaborators — Spaeny, Mizuno, Offerman — worked with Garland on Civil War, giving the project a core creative unit that moves at his specific frequency even as the scale around them expands radically.
The IP and Its Audience
The source material is not a marginal property dressed up as mainstream. Elden Ring (2022), developed by FromSoftware and directed by Hidetaka Miyazaki with worldbuilding by George R. R. Martin — who is also producing the film alongside Peter Rice, Andrew Macdonald, and Allon Reich — has sold more than 28.6 million copies worldwide as of September 2024, with the total climbing past 30 million since. It won Game of the Year at The Game Awards 2022 and is widely cited among the greatest games ever made. The Shadow of the Erdtree DLC, released in June 2024, extended that audience rather than cannibalizing it. The fanbase is not niche. It is global, literate in the mythology, and demonstrably willing to pay for new entries in this world.
That fanbase creates one kind of commercial foundation. It also creates a specific creative obligation. The game's defining quality is not its narrative in the conventional film sense — it is the oppressive, fragmented, atmospheric density of its world, the way meaning accrues through exploration rather than exposition. Garland, whose filmography from Ex Machina (2014) to Civil War (2024) is defined by withholding, by inference, by images that work harder than dialogue, is a plausible answer to that obligation. He is also, by his own account, a genuine player of the game — not a hired hand. Whether that combination survives contact with a 180-page script and a near-$200 million production apparatus is the only question that actually matters, and it will not be answered until 2028.
What the Number Really Means for A24
The studio that built its identity on Hereditary (2018) and Moonlight (2016) now has a film in post-production that, with the standard marketing multiplier applied, likely requires north of $500 million at the global box office to break even. A24's highest-grossing release in history earned $402 million worldwide. The math is visible and it is demanding. This is not a studio quietly stretching its ambition — it is a studio making a public declaration that it intends to compete at a scale it has never reached, in a genre it has never attempted, with a director whose previous largest film cost roughly one-quarter of this one.
That declaration carries real risk and real consequence regardless of outcome. If Elden Ring succeeds commercially, it validates a version of A24 that can run tentpole economics without becoming a major studio. If it struggles, the losses are structural rather than reputational — a $200 million fully-financed miss leaves marks. The Amazon deal softens the ceiling on the downside. It does not eliminate it.
What makes the AFM moment itself legible as a signal is the confidence embedded in the market strategy. A24 arrived with Amazon already signed, with a film in post, with a March 2028 date locked, and with IMAX confirmed. They are not selling a pitch deck. They are selling a completed bet. The studio is simultaneously riding the success of You Can See Everything in active release, which means AFM finds A24 commercially confident and narratively coherent about what it is becoming. The question the floor will answer is not whether buyers want a piece of this film. The question is what that piece costs — and whether the gap between what A24 is asking and what a $175–200 million video game fantasy from an indie distributor can realistically command will close. The recent performance of video game adaptations in theaters has been mixed at best, but few of them arrived with this creative pedigree, this IP weight, or this level of pre-market institutional confidence already baked in.
The Lands Between are coming to IMAX. The market is pricing the journey.
