Did You Hear Tom Holland Was Going to Be in The Legend of Zelda?

Sorry for the clickbait title, but seeing a fake trailer for the upcoming The Legend of Zelda film is what inspired this article. I instantly had my doubts about it because I hadn’t seen or heard anything about casting for the film, a movie which had only been officially announced a few weeks ago, and you’d think there would be a ton of buzz built for the film before anything official was put out. There would be months and months of casting rumors, each week we’d get some new star attached to the project, and then finally we’d have some promotional concept art months before filming started.

It would be a long, slow dribble of information because Nintendo and Sony know that fans have been asking for, really demanding, a Legend of ZeldaCreated by Nintendo in 1986, the original Legend of Zelda game presented players with a open world to explore, packed with dungeons and monsters all ready to kill them at a moment's notice. The mix of adventure and action game play created a winning game and launched not only a successful series but an entirely new video game genre. film for years. Nintendo was understandably gun shy about letting any studio play with their characters after the debacle that was the 1993 Super Mario Bros., but after the success 2023’s The Super Mario Bros. Movie, the studio was eager to shop their characters around and find a studio that could actually handle their brand respectfully. That’s how we have Sony Pictures handling The Legend of Zelda, and now everyone is eager and waiting for it.

I think the fans being eager for the film is great. That’s not the issue. The problem is that there’s an entire ecosystem online of fan-creations that drown out real products and make it hard to trust anything. Whenever some new film is announced, within days, maybe hours, people already have fake trailers up for it, fake movie posters to advertise it, fake products that drown out anything real. When I go to search for images and information on the next Marvel or DC film (which, because of this site, I’m researching extensively) I have to wade past hundreds of fake posters just to find one real one. Searches for the Thunderbolts* poster is full of hundreds of fakes, and the one real one I can find may or may not even be real. I can’t always be sure.

This is a problem I run into a lot, that glut of fake art spam, and it’s bad enough when it’s just posters or fake promotional stills. It’s even worse for fake trailers because they not only pollute video site feeds, but then stills from them go in and pollute image searches as well. And that’s to say nothing for all the social media posts that spread them, the various outlets saying, “is this trailer for real?” and all the hyperbolic news spinning that comes from it. It goes on and on into a feedback loop, drowning out anything real.

Needless to say, this gets to be pretty annoying. Doubly so when you then have to fight all the people saying, “this looks real. This has to be real, right?” It requires more effort to fight against bad media like this, and it muddies the conversation even further. It was bad enough when it was just fake rumors spreading around old media sites and ancient social media postings. The rate the internet moves at now, though, someone can AI up a decent looking fake trailer and suddenly they’re getting millions of views, causing the cycle then begins again.

I’m sure most people aren’t making this clickbait to be annoying. Some of them are just fans that want to express love for something coming up and do some theorycrafting in the process. I get that. I do my own share of, “what if? What could it be?” here on the site, although usually after a work is finished so I can use it as critique. But we’re all fans, to a certain extent, and we just want to love the media that interests us. If that leads to some fanworks and fan adoration online, that’s fine… but the ecosystem is polluted now.

Getting back to The Legend of Zelda, that film isn’t coming out until at least 2027. That’s two years of production on a film that hasn’t even begun casting, let alone filming yet. There is no way Sony already has a trailer (teaser or otherwise) put together for it. But some intrepid fan has put a trailer together, and when it came up in my feed I saw it had nearly a million views. For AI slapped together art it seems convincing enough, and plenty of people will buy that it’s real because we aren’t used to how dramatically AI art has improved. So it spreads, and causes more confusion, and gets more views.

And I’m sure, two years from now, when I go to write a review of the film after it comes out and I have to dig up pictures for the article, there it will be: fake stills of Tom Holland as Link from this fake trailer. I don’t get the benefit of press kits with production art like big sites receive. I have to cobble everything together here, and when Tom Holland’s mug shows up, staring at me from an image search, I’ll remember this stupid fake trailer and be annoyed all over again. Because damn it, this shit is everywhere now.

I don’t want to bitch at fans, mind you. If you love The Legend of Zelda and are super eager for the film to come out, that’s great. I’m right there with you. I have no doubt that the film could be an absolute banger. I do doubt that Tom Holland will be in it, no matter how much an AI trailer might say otherwise. It’s too early, and he’s (if we’re being honest) not the best fit for the Link character. Hell, he was already in a Sony Pictures film, Uncharted, and that film didn’t exactly light the world on fire. Something tells me they’ll look at that and go, “outside of SpidermanSure, DC Comics has Batman, Superman, and Wonder Woman, but among the most popular superheroes stands a guy from Marvel Comics, a younger hero dressed in red and blue who shoots webs and sticks to walls. Introduced in the 1960s, Spider-Man has been a constant presence in comics and more, featured in movies regularly since his big screen debut in 2002., is he really bankable?”

But expressing fan love isn’t what most of these trailers are for. They’re clickbait to get you to watch them, and then the fan that made them (which is really an AI mill studio) gets a bunch of money from the YouTube ads that played during the trailer. It’s a scam, like so much of the internet at this point, a means to make money off the rubes one way or another. And all it does is clutter out legitimate art, legitimate forms of expression. It drowns out the real fans as well as the actual studio productions, and then no one wins. No one except the scammers.

So it needs to stop. It just needs to be ended. Google needs to go through and clear out YouTube, the search engines need to weed out all this fake shit, and some kind of comprehensible order needs to be restored. It’s all just waste and trash right now, and anything worthwhile is shriveling because of it.