Kingdom Hearts is near impossible to turn into a movie

Lately, there has been chatter of Kingdom Hearts, everyone’s favourite mash-up of Disney magic and Final Fantasy-esque action, getting a movie adaptation. These rumours come courtesy of Disney fan site The DisInsider and film industry insider DanielRPK, but I’m not here to discuss the validity of their claims. Rather, I want to talk about how if Disney really does want a Kingdom Hearts movie, it faces an incredibly steep uphill battle.

I can imagine pitches for a Kingdom Hearts movie adaptation have floated within Disney for a while, especially in more recent years. After decades of embarrassments, video game movies have been popping off lately, with the likes of The Super Mario Bros. Movie, the Uncharted movie, and both Sonic the Hedgehog movies proving profitable for their respective IP holders. Kingdom Hearts is a big name, big enough for non-fans to recognize it, and its inclusion of beloved Disney characters would undoubtedly attract people who don’t even know what a Sora is. However, I do not think you can meaningfully translate Kingdom Hearts from a video game into a movie; not without some audience-alienating compromises.

You’d have to assume any Kingdom Hearts movie would be based on the original 2002 game which, despite the series’ reputation for having extremely complicated lore, does feature a fairly simple storyline. A young boy named Sora sets out on an adventure spanning multiple Disney worlds, alongside Donald Duck and Goofy, to save the universe from dark monsters while searching for his missing friends. I’d say that’s an apt and easy to understand summation of Kingdom Hearts‘ story, but it also barely scratches the surface. There is a lot going on in Kingdom Hearts; too much to condense into even a two-hour movie. Movie adaptations typically and understandably cut out chunks of their source material in order to fit their runtime, but when it comes to Kingdom Hearts, there’s nothing you can cut without it feeling incredibly jarring.

One of the main draws of the series is getting to visit all these faithful recreations of worlds based on beloved Disney movies. The first game alone is full of gems, from the madcap world of Wonderland from Alice in Wonderland to the gothic streets of Halloween Town from The Nightmare Before Christmas. Besides some of its outlandish story beats, this is what general audiences know Kingdom Hearts for, so you’d think a movie would make this a big focus. The problem is you wouldn’t be able to fit all of the first game’s nine Disney worlds into a rough runtime of two hours. Plus, with how self-contained most of these worlds are, only occasionally nudging the main plot forward, jumping from one to the next would feel incredibly jarring, even if Disney cut the number down to, say, only three worlds. It’d feel like one of those old direct-to-video Disney sequels, like Atlantis 2, which claimed to be movies but were clearly hastily stitched together standalone episodes of a TV show that never got off the ground.

On top of that, making the Disney visits the priority risks giving little time to the elements original to Kingdom Hearts. In the game, the opening hour is spent introducing Sora, his friends, and his island home before it’s all taken away from him. This is followed by his meeting with Donald and Goofy and learning about their quest, the threat of the Heartless, and the magical weapon known as the Keyblade. It’s the kind of set-up you can’t condense into the first 20 minutes of a feature-length film, not without it being haphazardly rushed or confusing to anyone who’s not touched the games.

So, is the answer to prioritize those elements and maybe skip over the Disney world stuff? Well, no, because then you’re eliminating an easy way of getting non-fans to watch the movie. I know some game fans wish the series would ditch the Disney element completely, but it’s a key part of its identity. Take that away, and you have another typical Square Enix RPG. Even if a movie were to put less emphasis on them, Disney characters would still be present, but would your average Disney lover be willing to sit through a Kingdom Hearts movie if the only characters to make an appearance were Donald, Goofy, and maybe Mickey Mouse himself? I don’t think so. Perhaps the only other alternative would be to completely overhaul the first game’s story to better fit it into the style of a movie, but then you’re left with something completely unrecognizable to fans.

No matter what, it feels like a direct movie adaptation is a no-win situation. It’s why I think the smartest thing to do would be to follow Amazon and Bethesda’s example with their Fallout TV show, and have a completely original plot set within the Kingdom Hearts universe. That way, you can craft a story that’s perfectly suited to the medium of film, rather than awkwardly truncate roughly 30 to 40 hours of video game. Unfortunately, that’s not entirely viable either, since it’d only really appeal to established fans. The average movie-going audience is far less likely to be intrigued, especially if it requires a deep understanding of Kingdom Hearts lore. Knowing this series, I can absolutely see a potential movie incorporating important plot points mandatory for understanding Kingdom Hearts 4 or something, like Square Enix did with the mobile games.

If anything, the structure of Kingdom Hearts would be a much better fit for a Disney+ TV show. In the games, each world acts like their own story arc, and can quite easily be condensed into one or two episodes. A show could even expand upon each world with new story elements. Die-hard fans already know there was a pilot for such a TV show back in 2003 that obviously never got the greenlight. If Disney wants to bring a new audience to the games, a Disney+ series would be a smart way of doing it.

I would not be surprised if this rumoured movie is real, but ultimately gets shot down before any actual progress is made for whatever reason. Some pitches simply never get off the ground. However, the current climate could embolden Disney to give it a shot. Cross-promotion works as evidenced by Amazon’s aforementioned Fallout show increased sales and player counts for Bethesda’s games.

That’s not the only example; Nintendo’s enjoyed a boost in sales thanks to the Mario movie (per this financial report), and The Last of Us saw renewed interest thanks to its own TV adaptation. A well-made movie combined with the launch of Kingdom Hearts 4, whenever that is, could be huge for Disney and Square Enix. I do not envy whoever is put in charge of such a project, though, because it is far too easy to get catastrophically wrong, resulting in a product that fails to sell Kingdom Hearts to potential new fans while angering the ones it already has.