Nintendo announces 'Legend of Zelda' live-action adaptation

Nintendo (NTDOY) shares saw gains Wednesday after the video game company announced it will release a live-action "Legend of Zelda" movie funded and distributed by Sony. This news comes on the heels of the successful release of Nintendo's Super Mario Bros. movie adaptation earlier this year.

Yahoo Finance's Entertainment Reporter Alexandra Canal breaks down the details of Nintendo's strategy, providing insights on the trend of gaming companies leveraging popular franchises and characters to produce blockbuster movies.

For more expert insight and the latest market action, click here to watch this full episode of Yahoo Finance Live.

Video transcript

RACHELLE AKUFFO: Now to gaming, Nintendo has announced that it will be coming out with a live action movie of Legend of Zelda-- super excited-- hopefully riding on the coattails of the company's successful foray into movies with "Super Mario Brothers". Let's bring in Yahoo Finance's Alexandra Canal to give us more details. I played the game as a kid. The Mario movie did fantastic. I'm excited about this, Ali.

ALEXANDRA CANAL: I knew you were going to be excited about this, Rachelle, and I'm excited too. Japanese game maker Nintendo, developing that live action film release of Zelda. It will be financed in part by Sony who will also distribute the film. You mentioned that this follows the ultra success of the "Super Mario Brothers" movie. We saw that film capture $1.4 billion at the global box office.

Earlier today, we saw Nintendo shares jump as much as 6% on the heels of that news. They're up just under 5% right now, but this game franchise in particular has been very popular. Nintendo has said it sold nearly 20 million copies of the latest title in the series following its May launch through September, and that's strength in the gaming unit actually prompted Nintendo, on Tuesday, to raise its profit forecast by 24% for the fiscal year ending in March.

So it's a strategy that we're really seeing across media right now, especially if you think about some of the box office films that have done well this year, Mattel's "Barbie" just another example of how you can really utilize a product or a game to drive sales. And it's likely that we're going to see this strategy be repeated by other media companies.

Kevin Mayer, who is the former streaming head at Disney, he currently serves as the co-CEO of his company, Candle Media, he hinted at this during the Yahoo Finance Invest Conference on Tuesday. And during my conversation with him, he said gaming was really the last frontier for Disney to tackle. Take a listen to what he had to say.

KEVIN MAYER: Games is the one place where I think Disney has not yet made a substantial investment, it's also a place where people can interact with and spend a lot of time with their favorite characters in context so in a game context. They're in-- they're in the places that you want to see them, and you can interact with the characters, you can control them, and you can monetize it.

So gaming is the last big sort of business platform--

ALEXANDRA CANAL: Yeah, so really interesting comments there, especially considering we've seen Netflix really lean on games recently as well so just another way to really keep users in the ecosystem of a company and you never know, you can have a game be super successful that it turns into a billion dollar box office movie.

We'll see if Zelda can accomplish what the "Super Mario Brothers" did earlier this year.

JARED BLIKRE: Hey, you can't deny that "Barbie" juggernaut for sure. Thank you for that, Ali Canal.