A24's $100M Elden Ring Film Leaks Scene by Scene

Somewhere in what appears to be the Royal Naval College in Greenwich, London, a man dressed as the Loathsome Dung Eater is strung up while a crowd of elaborately costumed extras pelts him with food scraps. Someone nearby pulled out a phone and filmed it. That clip, along with half a dozen others from the set of Alex Garland's Elden Ring movie, has been circulating online all week, and at this rate we'll have a rough cut assembled from bystander footage before A24 releases a single official frame.

The clips, collected on UnBoxPHD's YouTube channel, are short but revealing. Beyond the Dung Eater execution, there's footage of Emma Laird walking up and down a staircase in a billowy blue dress with long gold braids, almost certainly playing Queen Marika. Kit Connor can be spotted on set in another clip. And then there's the one that caught my attention most: a packed market scene, full of regular people going about their daily lives in what looks like a thriving, pre-Shattering Lands Between.

That market scene is the most interesting thing to leak so far, and I don't think it's getting enough attention. FromSoftware's games are defined by absence. You explore the ruins of civilizations that peaked centuries before you arrived. The NPCs you meet are stragglers, weirdos, and things that used to be human. Seeing the Lands Between as a functioning society, with merchants hawking goods and crowds milling through streets, is something the game never gives you. If Garland is dedicating real screen time to showing what this world looked like before the Shattering tore it apart, that's a creative choice that could give the film an emotional anchor the game deliberately withholds. It also means the inevitable collapse will hit harder for an audience that isn't already steeped in item descriptions and lore videos.

Pre-Shattering or Flashback?

The big question is whether these scenes represent a significant chunk of the film's first act or a brief flashback that sets the stage before everything goes wrong. The Dung Eater execution is something Elden Ring players only glimpse in the game's intro, so it's plausible this is all one sequence, maybe five minutes of screen time establishing the world before it shatters. But the scale of the market set, the number of extras, the detail in the costumes; that's a lot of production effort for a throwaway montage. I think Garland is building something more substantial here, and given his track record with world-building in films like Annihilation and Ex Machina, I'm inclined to trust the instinct.

According to The Hollywood Reporter, the film's budget sits well over $100 million with around 100 days of principal photography planned, making it the most expensive project A24 has ever taken on. The cast is stacked: Kit Connor, Ben Whishaw, Cailee Spaeny, Tom Burke, Nick Offerman, Jonathan Pryce, and several others. Garland both wrote the script and is directing, having reportedly pitched the idea to Bandai Namco himself. The release date is set for March 3, 2028.

What nobody at A24 planned for, clearly, is how difficult it is to film on location in places like Greenwich without someone pointing a camera at you. The Church of Marika set was spotted in a field earlier this month, and now we've got multiple angles on key scenes. For a production this expensive and this secretive, the leak situation is bordering on comical. I'm not complaining, because every clip that surfaces makes me more confident Garland understands what makes this world work, but A24's marketing team must be tearing their hair out.

The cast still doesn't have confirmed character assignments beyond Laird's apparent role as Marika. Elden Ring sold over 30 million copies as of April 2025 and spawned the multiplayer spinoff Nightreign, so the audience for this film is enormous and deeply opinionated. Garland filling the Lands Between with living, breathing people before ripping it all away is exactly the kind of adaptation choice that could make this more than a lore recap with a Hollywood budget. Whether A24 can keep anything else under wraps between now and March 2028 is another matter entirely.