If you somehow haven’t heard, the Super Mario Bros Movie by Nintendo and Illumination is easily the biggest success of 2023. It’s made over a billion dollars, and it’s still making history with each weekend at the box office it has. Even as its main theatrical run ends, people are still heaping praise upon the film. But what might surprise you is that one of the biggest positive statements about the film came from one of the rivals of Nintendo. Specifically, the CEO of Sony went to see the film, and he wasn’t afraid to make it clear how much he loved it.
Sony CEO Kenichiro Yoshida is who we’re talking about, and not only did he praise the movie, he praised the entire Mario IP:
That’s something that many people forget when they talk about the “console wars” of today and recent generations. While it’s true that each company wants to have “its piece of the pie” and is always vying for a bigger piece, most have humble origins in gaming. Yoshida was one of the millions who played the original titles with Mario and learned to love gaming through them. For that generation, the original NES was the pinnacle of what gaming could be, and the generations after that inspired many wondrous things that led to their careers being born.
So while there are “console wars,” that doesn’t mean that the three brands all hate each other with a passion. A whole company rarely hates another. It’s merely that one person is trying to get a stake in things and doesn’t want interference from the others, like what’s happening with Sony and Microsoft over Activision Blizzard. You might remember the three “heads” of Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo coming out together for The Game Awards one year to preach unity in gaming. That was a big moment.
Getting back to the Super Mario Bros Movie, there’s little doubt that its success will spur Microsoft and Sony to attempt to do their own thing and make equally successful films of video game properties. The problem is that they’ve tried that before with multiple franchises in both live-action and animation with very little success.
You could argue that the “brand of Mario” was enough to overcome certain hurdles. You could also argue that the teams behind the movie simply knew how to use the world Mario and his friends live in to their advantage and make an enjoyable movie.
