George R. R. Martin Discusses Potential Elden Ring Movie at IGN Fan Fest 2025

George R. R. Martin, the mastermind behind the world of FromSoftware’s Elden Ring, has dropped the strongest hint yet that a movie adaptation might be on the horizon. However, he also acknowledged a significant obstacle to his potential involvement: his ongoing work on The Winds of Winter.

Elden Ring, which Martin helped craft, became a blockbuster hit in 2022, thanks in part to his creative input. The game's credits prominently feature Martin alongside FromSoftware's Hidetaka Miyazaki as co-creators of the Elden Ring universe. When asked about a potential sequel, Martin sidestepped the topic but hinted at a movie adaptation during IGN Fan Fest 2025, stating, "Well, I can't say too much about it, but there is some talk about making a movie out of Elden Ring."

This isn't the first time Martin has teased an Elden Ring movie. Hidetaka Miyazaki, president of FromSoftware, has also expressed openness to an adaptation, but emphasized the need for a "very strong partner" to bring such a project to life. In an interview with The Guardian, Miyazaki said, "I don’t see any reason to deny another interpretation or adaptation of Elden Ring, a movie for example. But I don’t think myself, or FromSoftware, have the knowledge or ability to produce something in a different medium. So that’s where a very strong partner would come into play."

Despite the excitement around a potential movie, Martin told IGN that his commitment to The Winds of Winter—the long-awaited sixth book in his A Song of Ice and Fire series—might limit his involvement. He said, "We'll see if that [the Elden Ring movie] comes to pass and what the extent of my involvement was, I don't know. I'm a few years behind with my latest book, so that also limits the amount of things that I can do."

Fans of Martin’s fantasy novels have been eagerly awaiting The Winds of Winter for over a decade. Martin himself has acknowledged the delays, humorously stating in December, "Unfortunately, I am 13 years late. Every time I say that, I’m [like], ‘How could I be 13 years late?’ I don’t know, it happens a day at a time. But that’s still a priority. A lot of people are already writing obituaries for me. [They’re saying] ‘Oh, he’ll never be finished.’ Maybe they’re right. I don’t know. I’m alive right now! I seem pretty vital!"

The wait for The Winds of Winter has been increasingly bleak, especially since the last book in the series, A Dance With Dragons, was published in 2011—the same year HBO launched the wildly popular Game of Thrones series, bringing even more attention to Martin’s work.

Regarding his contribution to Elden Ring, Martin explained to IGN how he helped FromSoftware with worldbuilding: "…when they came to me, FromSoftware, they wanted the world. They knew the action of Elden Ring that the players would get into would be in the ‘present.’ But something had created that present, had created that world. So where did that world come from? And I've done a lot of world building, most notably on Westeros and the backgrounds of A Song of Ice and Fire and Game of Thrones. And I like doing world building. So what had happened 5,000, 10,000 years before the current day action in Elden Ring that led them to that place? And I had some ideas about the magic and the runes. There was a lot about runes. And I worked it all out."

Martin also shared details about his collaboration with the FromSoftware team, saying, "It was interesting that the team flew in and we had a number of sessions and they would fly back and do their magic, and then they would come back here a couple months later and show me what they had, which was always amazing to see what they came up with."

When asked if all of his work was used in the game, Martin noted that there’s often more material in worldbuilding than what appears on screen, saying, "Yeah, I think especially when you're world building, there's always more that you actually see on the screen. And that's true of any of these big epic fantasies. I mean, you look at Tolkien and there are hundreds of pages of past history before you get to even the era of the Hobbit and dozens of kings and wars and things like that."