Jon M. Chu Must Do What Villeneuve Did, Not What Sony Kept Doing

Nintendo just cast Uli Latukefu, an Australian actor most people have never heard of, as Ganondorf in the upcoming Zelda film.

Deadline reports he signed a multi-picture deal — how you announce a franchise without announcing it. The casting choice itself is the message, revealing a calculation about how audiences relate to characters they already own in their minds.

This strategy has a template. In 2013, Sony cast Topher Grace, then best known for That '70s Show, as Venom in The Amazing Spider-Man 2. The logic was clean, separate the villain from the actor's existing fame so audiences see only the character. It failed so badly that Sony eventually abandoned the universe.

Two years later, when Oscar Isaac played Moon Knight in a limited series nobody watched, Sony was running the same play. But Denis Villeneuve's Dune Part Two cast Stellan Skarsgård in a pivotal role. Most casual audiences had no idea who he was. The film worked. The difference wasn't the actor's obscurity, it was that Villeneuve's directorial vision became the story, not the casting.

When the filmmaker's intention is clear and distinctive, audiences don't need a famous face to anchor themselves.

Nintendo is betting it can do what Villeneuve did. That means everything depends on whether the director — Jon M. Chu, whose visual language tilts toward spectacle and sentiment. Can make his version of Hyrule feel like an inevitable world, not a licensed property someone needed to fill. When the filmmaker's intention is clear and distinctive, audiences don't need a famous face to anchor themselves. They trust the work instead. If Chu can't deliver that vision, Latukefu becomes invisible for the wrong reason. The actor will disappear into the costume while the audience watches someone else's idea of Ganondorf.

Watch whether the reviews describe what the filmmaker chose to do with the villain or what the actor brought to the role. That distinction tells you whether Nintendo understood why Villeneuve's casting worked. More importantly, it tells you whether you trust the person making the choice enough to let a stranger inhabit something you thought you already knew.