Some points I want to make.
First is the "silent protagonist" concept. Yes, we all know link dialogue consists of mostly gasps, yells, grunts, and the occasional "C'mon!". But I, for one, think having a silent protagonist in a movie would A) cripple the movie, and B) be inapplicable to the movie. Think back - why did Miyamoto say Link doesn't talk? Because he wanted to establish a deeper connection between the player and game protagonist. He wanted to make people think that they were Link. That same sort of connection on a deeper level is lost in a movie, because it is scripted and we the audience have no say or control over what Link in the movie does. So let him talk. If anything, dialogue will help us, the audience, to establish a connection (in terms of "relating to") the character. We'll never "feel" like we're Link when watching a movie. That type of connection can only come from playing a game.
Now on to the actual movie concept:
My opinion is that it's not impossible, but most probably should NOT be made. There's too much it would be up against. Namely, everyone's familiarity with the "Lord of the Rings" movies. That ruined "The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion the With and Wardrobe" for me. I kept saying to myself "This movie is trying to be the Lord of the Rings." What would really happen is that a Zelda movie would get little production support, and end up sucking like the Super Mario Movie or just totally mishandles like Street Fighter.
Now, we can't make blanket generalizations saying "all video games turned into movies sucked," because there were a couple that were entertaining. For example, I really like "Resident Evil".
My proposition is this:
The Legend of Zelda universe is so freaking huge, that even three movies that ran 3 and half hours would leave out LOTS of stuff (a total of 10 and a half hours). And 3 and half hours is REALLY pushing it for the tolerance level of movie audiences. People were saying Spider-Man 3 was too long, and that was 2 1/2.
BUT.......what about a TV series? Why try to cram everything into a 3.5 hour block when you can break it up into several 1 hour blocks over the course of several weeks? You're looking at at-lease 15 hours for a single season! That's a lot of time to do some story-telling.
I'll go one step further. Make it computer animated (as other have stated). Now, I personally wouldn't want the characters to have that "wood-puppet" look and stiffness like the movie Clone Wars (nor would I want the 10-year old mentality and "humor" of the characters). I say computer animated, but try to make it look realistic - like those
cinematic trailers for the World of Warcraft games. Maybe get a team for Pixar or something to do this as a side project or something.
I don't know much about how much animated things cost to make, but if the cost is low enough, I'd say you don't even need to actually put it on TV. That market is saturated and there's still too many shows that completely own certain time-slots (24, Lost, CSI, etc.), and putting a animated Zelda series against them would be dooming the project before it started. Instead, just release it on the Internet. Let us watch it through Hulu. Or, we can watch it on a network's website. That way, they can just advertise the show on TV (like a small commercial when one of their top shows is on). So it gets marketed, it gets distributed through a medium that video gamers (the target audience) should be familiar with - hell, they can even throw in a 15-30 second add after every 10 minutes and I wouldn't care.
My opinion is this seems much more feasible than trying to make a full-blown movie.
So after production, marketing, and distribution are taken care of, there's one final obstacle, and it's probably the most difficult - appeasing the fans. No matter what kind of story they write, it's going to anger some chunk of fans. If they make it too similar, people will complain its not original enough and they should just play the game. If it strays too far, people will complain it's not capturing the essence of what made the games great.
As much as I would love to see a good, animated, Zelda series, as stated by other, this is most likely a lose/lose/maybe-slightly-win for Big N. So I guess we can only dream of an awesome CG fight between Link and a 4-headed Gleeok..... *sigh*
