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The Super Mario Bros. Movie introduces its namesake duo with a commercial. It’s Brooklyn, before they get sucked into the Mushroom Kingdom, and they’ve made a local TV ad to hawk their plumbing skills. As a filmmaking tool, it’s a near-perfect piece of exposition, establishing who the Mario brothers are in mere minutes. As a setup for the film itself, it’s almost ironic—and one big commercial for Nintendo’s mega-franchise.
Most transmedia properties are about milking intellectual property for fun and profit. It’s highly unlikely that Sonic the Hedgehog (the movie) would have been greenlit if it was an elevator pitch and not an adaptation of a wildly successful video game franchise. Appealing to an established fan base is the point—and also where many adaptations trip up. That’s where the original Super Mario Bros. movie, released in 1993, fell short. It wanted the audience but offered something that didn’t look like the game they loved.
The Super Mario Bros. Movie (the new one) definitely doesn’t have this problem. From beginning to end, it’s fan service. Built around Mario’s quest to team up with Princess Peach to save the Mushroom Kingdom and Luigi, from Bowser’s vicious rule, it’s full of nothing but game references. These include, but are not limited to, a training montage for power-ups, a 15-minute sequence dedicated to Mario Kart’s iconic Rainbow Road, and an entire Donkey Kong interlude. (I think I also caught a fleeting reference to Luigi’s Mansion.) Watching it feels like playing a Mario franchise game—a move contrary to the The Last of Us creators’ dump the gameplay ethos.
Getting people excited about gaming is the point. There are few pop culture icons as enduring as those from Nintendo’s early days—the Mario brothers, The Legend of Zelda’s link—but, as we’ve noted before, Nintendo has been in a creative rut for a while. Fans are still gobbling up Switches and playing games from those legendary franchises (The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom arrives later this year), but Nintendo has to bank on a movie all those original fans can bring their kids to, one that is sure to hook a new generation on its undefeated faves. The Super Mario Bros. Movie itself may be poised to make more than $100 million in its opening weekend, but it also seems destined to sell millions of games for years to come.
It should be noted that The Super Mario Bros. Movie isn’t bad—it’s actually quite fun, and all those kids with Nintendo-loving parents are sure to be enchanted. It is likely to succeed where its predecessor failed, overcoming Mario creator Shigeru Miyamoto’s biggest worry. Miyamoto, and Nintendo, made the film with Illumination (the studio behind the Despicable Me franchise) and Universal—a deal that came together nearly three decades after the last Mario movie. “We were fearful of all the failure of past IP adaptations, where there’s a license and a distance between the original creators and the creators of the films,” Miyamoto recently told Variety, which noted that he didn’t reference ’93 movie specifically.
“The fans get outraged and mad because the studios didn’t do justice to the original work. We really didn’t want a backlash.”
This new Super Mario movie is unlikely to cause outrage. At worst, it might inspire yawns. As WIRED wrote a couple of years ago, “Nintendo could rely on past successes forever and still remain on top of the gaming universe. Yet the company thrives when it’s publishing games that tickle everyone’s imagination, not just the sentimental memories of its biggest fans.” The same will hold true for adaptations of its games.
In that Variety piece, Illumination CEO Chris Meledandri said he wouldn’t rule out Mario sequels. If The Super Mario Bros. Movie is in any way successful, this seems all but inevitable. An ever-growing lineup of new Mario games and reissues also appears likely, keeping Nintendo on top of the games world and Hollywood. For the new generation of fans, this will be a thrill. But ultimately, it will only be triggering their sentimental memories, not tickling their imaginations.