*Bloodborne*, *Elden Ring*, and *Sekiro* Adaptation Wave Arrives in 2026!

The last time I was clearing the map in the Lands Between, a strong thought suddenly hit me: FromSoftware’s worlds have long since become more than just levels and bosses. They’re more like an old map that was deliberately left without annotations—the farther you go toward the edges, the more you can feel the folds in the story. And because of that, I’ve always felt that the hardest part of adapting Soulslike games isn’t recreating the monsters, but whether you can preserve that feeling of “the world slowly unfolding before you.” Looking at it from that angle, 2026 will most likely really become a bumper season for FS fans.

There are currently three officially confirmed adaptations in development, spanning three formats: an animated film, a live-action film, and an animated series. Bloodborne will receive an R-rated animated movie, a project that Sony Pictures officially announced at CinemaCon 2026. On the production side, it is being co-produced by PlayStation Productions and the animation studio Lyrical Animation, with Jacksepticeye serving as producer. Sony Pictures Motion Picture Group chairman Sanford Panitch also mentioned that the work will be “very faithful” to the spirit of the original game. That said, neither the release date nor the voice cast has been announced yet, so that part of the map is still covered in fog.

If we’re talking purely about suitability, I actually think Bloodborne has the best chance of standing out. Yharnam, hunters, beastly transformation, and religious horror already feel like a city shrouded in mist—the more familiar the streets become, the more wrong everything feels. As an R-rated animated film, it would be easier than live action to preserve that exaggerated, viscous visual impact. And if you look a little farther, you’ll realize that what FS worlds fear most isn’t a lack of gore, but having their atmosphere sanded flat until all that remains is a Gothic shell. Now that the official side has openly put “faithful to the spirit of the original” front and center, at least the first step is headed in the right direction.

Elden Ring, meanwhile, is taking a different main road: a live-action movie, and with a very strong lineup. The project is being developed by A24 and Bandai Namco Entertainment, directed by Alex Garland, with George R. R. Martin and Hidetaka Miyazaki also listed among the producers, and filming has already begun. For open-world players, the most precious thing about Elden Ring is that whenever you crest a highland, it always feels like discovering an unmarked path on Google Maps—only to follow it all the way down into the underground, the royal capital, or the ruins of an entirely unfamiliar civilization. Whether a live-action film can capture that layered sense of descending ever deeper into space will be the key to its success or failure.

But beyond the map itself, I also have a certain instinctive wariness toward Elden Ring. A huge part of its appeal comes from the player personally exploring, piecing together the narrative, and enduring solitude. If the film explains everything too plainly, it could easily turn from “discovering a continent” into “taking a sightseeing bus around the city once.” Still, the combination of A24 and Alex Garland at least suggests that the studio isn’t aiming to make just another generic fantasy assembly-line production. In theory, there’s a real chance its stylistic expression and room for ambiguity can be preserved.

By comparison, Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice seems to have the steadiest adaptation route. The anime Sekiro: Never Surrender was officially announced at Gamescom 2025, will follow the game’s main storyline, and will stream exclusively on Crunchyroll in 2026. Considering that Sekiro is already the most narratively concentrated and clearly character-driven of all FS titles, this kind of adaptation is almost like building a plank road along an existing mountain path: it’s still difficult, but at least the route is visible. On top of that, ever since the game launched in 2019, its popularity has never truly faded, so the anime naturally comes with a stable built-in audience.

If you look at these three together, I’d say they correspond to three of FS’s most iconic strengths: Bloodborne sells atmosphere and mutation, Elden Ring sells worldbuilding and scale, and Sekiro sells character and action rhythm. For the player community, this also makes for a pretty interesting split test—those who love lore analysis and worldbuilding will probably be watching Elden Ring most closely; those drawn to stylistic impact will likely camp out for Bloodborne first; and those who want to see a complete, cleanly executed story brought to life will probably cast their vote for Sekiro.

As someone who can’t relax until every question mark on the map is cleared, the two I’m most looking forward to are still Elden Ring and Bloodborne. If the former succeeds, it would mean taking the “open-world Souls feel” and truly pushing it one step further into film and television for the first time; if the latter holds steady, that sense of oppression could very well extend even more fiercely beyond the game itself. As for Sekiro, I’m more inclined to see it as the safest foothold of 2026. With all three lines moving forward at once, FS adaptations finally feel less like testing the waters and more like a real expansion of the territory.