Christopher Dring of The Game Business has dropped an interesting new tidbit about the Switch 2.
In the middle of last month, somewhat ignored in light of the frenzy over the Switch 2’s Direct and the start of pre-orders, Dring randomly shared this message on Twitter:
“They’ll be a different Switch 2 bundle in 2026. Perhaps featuring a game that ties-in with a certain movie.”
And if there was any ambiguity about what Dring was hinting at, here’s a response he made to a fan in conversation:
“There’s no way Nintendo hasn’t got a 3D Mario game deep in development. I wouldn’t be surprised if DK Bonanza is a secondary project. That game certainly didn’t feel like Mario quality when I played it.”
Now, some of you may disagree on his opinion about Donkey Kong Bananza, which he is free to have. But, whether you personally like Dring or not, he now has a track record for the Switch 2. He correctly predicted in August of last year that the console was already planned to release in 2025, sometime between April or May. While the console release itself was staggered to June, Dring can say he was more correct than all the leakers who strung Nintendo fans along from August to December of last year.
In this case, there’s no reason to overly speculate on Dring’s clues. Last year, Nintendo announced that The Super Mario Bros. Movie 2 would be released on April 2026, for both the US and Japan. That absolutely sounds like there was sufficient time to plan and release a spinoff game with the movie.
Let us explain a bit further why this makes sense. While news about a new Mario animated movie was going around since the Wii U era, production didn’t start quite yet. Miyamoto, freshly retired from game development, started working with Universal Parks on Super Nintendo World in 2015. A year after, he got connected to Chris Meledandri, the president of Illumination Pictures.
In 2017, the same year that the Switch was originally released, alongside The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, Nintendo confirmed they were talking to Universal, but it wasn’t until 2018 when they finally decided to move forward.
The next two years was spent on writing and planning, and the actual animation process happened between September 2020 to October 2022. So the actual production didn’t take very long, and Nintendo and Universal had sufficient time to prepare the film for its eventual April 2023 release. Nintendo and Universal hinted that they did have plans for sequels, but waited until the first film was a certified success before they confirmed it.
We would speculate that Nintendo was making a 3D Mario game for the Switch 2 around 2020, the same time they were working on the first movie. They knew that it wouldn’t make it in time for the first movie’s release, but that it would be well scheduled for the Switch 2. And even if it wasn’t a certainty, they also may have figured it could be huge to get the game ready to release around the same time as the second movie.
All of this coming together would only be possible if everything had processed smoothly between the developers at Nintendo EPD, the animators at Illumination, and their bosses running everything between Nintendo and Universal. While it’s possible that plans can change, this rumor certainly suggests that they managed to get full convergence on their plans. We’re looking forward to the next year of Mario for sure.
