Shigeru Miyamoto has revealed Nintendo’s newfound interest in bringing their IP to the movies.
This was the statement he shared with Fortune:
We’ve had, over the years, a number of people who have come to us and said ‘Why don’t we make a movie together—or we make a movie and you make a game and we’ll release them at the same time? Because games and movies seem like similar mediums, people’s natural expectation is we want to take our games and turn them into movies. … I’ve always felt video games, being an interactive medium, and movies, being a passive medium, mean the two are quite different.
As we look more broadly at what is Nintendo’s role as an entertainment company, we’re starting to think more and more about how movies can fit in with that—and we’ll potentially be looking at things like movies in the future.
Recently, there have been rumors of a The Legend of Zelda TV series in development by Netflix. There was also a surprising revelation from the Sony email leaks that Marvel Entertainment’s architect, Avi Arad, had been attempting to get a Mario movie made under Sony Pictures. This was one of the pitches Miyamoto was alluding to.
Setting speculation aside, however, Nintendo has chosen a good time to start getting into the movies again. The landscape is completely different from when Super Mario Bros The Movie and The Wizard were released in the 1980s. Geekier pop culture properties like Saturday morning cartoons and comic books have become prime source material for the biggest blockbusters in over a decade. On top of that is the renaissance of animated features, under the guise of family friendly 3D films.
We have already seen Nintendo approve use of their properties in Wreck-it-Ralph and most recently Pixels. Miyamoto himself created a series of 3D animated Pikmin shorts.
How do you think Nintendo should navigate this new path to animated features? I personally think the pressure is too high for their biggest properties, so they should start with lesser known, but classic, IP, like Star Fox, Metroid, or Kirby.
They could also go nuts and make their own film/entertainment studio, a la Marvel or WWE. Do you find yourself agreeing or no? Share your thoughts with us in the comments.
