Will NINTENDO Start Making Movies Again?!


Video game movies are infamous in Hollywood for a number of reasons, but it all kicked off with the 90’s Super Mario Bros. movie. To be frank, it was terrible. People expected THIS…

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Well, maybe not so much, since this isn’t from the 90’s.

…not this.

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Ever since then video game movies have developed a bit of a bad reputation, but that hasn’t stopped studios from continually pumping them out (the awful-looking Hitman: Agent 47 is out now). However, the future is looking bright; a Michael Fassbender-starring Assassin’s Creed is on its way and Tom Hardy is making a Splinter Cell adaptation last I checked. One company who might be looking to cash in on a potential new craze is Nintendo, who basically gave up after the aforementioned Mario disaster.

Chatting with Fortune, game designer Shigeru Miyamoto revealed that he’s overseeing character licenses in Hollywood and what not, which could branch out to another foray into filmmaking.

“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.”

Basically, they’re probably gonna hook up with a studio sooner or later.

During the big Sony Hack of ’14, it was leaked that infamous Spider-Man producer Avi Arad was trying to get a Mario movie made but nothing came of it. The character did make a cameo in Sony’s Pixels, as did Donkey Kong, so it’s already begun in a way. However, it might be more likely that Nintendo would go for Universal; they recently signed a deal for rides based on their game properties to start showing up in their theme parks, plus the company have a lucrative partnership with Illumination Entertainment (they’re responsible for the Minions).

Another attempt at a Super Mario Bros. movie will probably happen sooner rather than later – except this time it’ll likely be animated. I could see Nintendo maybe even kicking off their own cinematic universe (even if the term is poison to most fans’ ears by now); hell, throw Sonic the Hedgehog in there too. I think when the comic book movie bubble bursts in a few years’ time and we stop seeing so many produced then video game adaptations could be the next big thing. That then also raises a bunch of questions about interconnectivity between video games and movies and whether one platform could influence the other. Some studios are already working on ways to make the moviegoing experience a more interactive one, and with the rise of things such as Oculus Rift we could be watching very different movies within the next decade or so. It sounds crazy to be throwing these kind of ideas out there in an article like this, but the concept of giant shared universes sounded crazy before Iron Man

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What would you want to see in a Super Mario movie, or would you want to see another Nintendo property done first? Could they revitalise the movie industry as they did with video games? Sound off!