Nintendo CEO Shuntaro Furukawa has revealed that the company is more deeply involved in the new upcoming The Super Mario Bros Movie than even their fans had thought.
In the company’s presentation from their financial report, Furukawa shared these bullet points:
“Rather than simply making this movie a licensing arrangement, we are deeply involved in the production process, including investment, planning and development.
We are creating a wide range of opportunities for people to learn about Nintendo IP through visual content, which can spread awareness through channels different from our dedicated game platform business.”
Nintendo is notoriously close lipped about their upcoming projects, and that was true of this movie as much as it has been for their video games. Miyamoto actually repeatedly denied that a movie was even in production. To be fair, it may have really been the case that Miyamoto and Nintendo changed their mind after seeing the hype from the rumors.
It was only relatively recently that they confirmed that they financially backed the project. Now we know that it was not just Miyamoto, now a technology fellow no longer directly involved in game development, who was brought over to Illumination to help shepherd the project. Nintendo’s active game studio staff also brought their own contribution to it. Hopefully we will learn in time who they had tapped to help Miyamoto and Illumination. In particular, it’s well known that many of Miyamoto’s colleagues who helped make the Mario games, including Katsuya Eguchi and Takashi Tezuka, are all veterans in the highest developer positions in Nintendo themselves.
But it mostly seems like Nintendo having learned the hard lesson from the original Super Mario Bros movie from 1993. A famous box office bomb and production nightmare, that movie was well known for having diverged widely from the video game’s premise and presentation. In spite of a gigantic for the time $ 40 + million budget, and a star studded cast including Bob Hoskins, Dennis Hopper, and John Leguizamo, the movie was broken while it was being made. Most blame the contentious direction of pair Rocky Morton and Annabel Jankel for making it terrible, but some of the people who made the movie actually thought changing the movie to be its own thing was a good idea.
This may surprise you, but one of those people who thought it was a good idea was Nintendo CEO Hiroshi Yamauchi, the same CEO responsible for Nintendo’s rise to the top of the industry. Clearly, in the years since, the company was chastened away from even trying to expand their properties, but maybe they stayed away for far too long. Here and now, Nintendo seems willing to take some of the risk themselves, to make sure we will all get the Super Mario Bros movie we deserve.
The Super Mario Bros movie will be released in North America on April 7, 2023.
