Hacker Cinema
The Super Mario Bros. Movie
2023 · Film · 93 min
Part of The Super Mario Collection
Directed by Michael Jelenic, Aaron Horvath
FamilyComedyAdventureFantasyAnimation
While working underground to fix a water main, Brooklyn plumbers—and brothers—Mario and Luigi are transported down a mysterious pipe and wander into a magical new world. But when the brothers are separated, Mario embarks on an epic quest to find Luigi.
2 positive9 neutralfrom 11 commenters
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12 comments on Hacker News
Super Mario Bros. is a movie [0].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Super_Mario_Bros._Movie
Interesting, all these years I just assumed Despicable Me was a Pixar property. Never heard of Illumination before but I enjoyed their work on The Super Mario Bros Movie.
I should have said, "re-allowed." But yes, and after that first movie, Nintendo really didn't want to let anyone else near their IP for a long, long time.
The Acquired episodes on Nintendo are great btw, and cover this extensively:
https://www.acquired.fm/episodes/nintendo
https://www.acquired.fm/episodes/nintendo-the-console-wars
From Wikipedia:
Released on May 28, 1993, Super Mario Bros. was a critical and financial failure, grossing $38.9 million worldwide against a budget of $42–48 million. Though appearing on several lists of the worst films ever made, it has developed a following over the years,[9][10] and has been reappraised by some as a cult classic for being "so bad it's good".[11][12][13] In 2013, a webcomic sequel was produced in collaboration with Bennett. After Super Mario Bros., Nintendo would not license another film based on the Super Mario game series for 30 years, until an animated reboot titled The Super Mario Bros. Movie was released on April 5, 2023.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_Mario_Bros._(film)
Well, the total gaming industry is almost 10 times bigger than the entire movie industry. So it actually makes more sense to try and create a hit game than a hit movie. We already have seen two new surprise super hits since the start of the year on steam. When was the last surprise hit like that from a big movie production? Probably the Mario movie from almost a year ago.
I'm not sure I agree.
I love how recent movies feature a broader range of characters. I was watching the Super Mario Bros Movie yesterday (not Disney) and it was so refreshing to see a strong, leading princess. Likewise I absolutely love seeing different kinds of people featured in Disney movies. It feels like they finally started putting a bit of everyone into their movies. It does not feel forced at all.
And why is messaging a problem? Wasn't Wall-E great? And what about The Wind Rises (not Disney)? Did Soul suffer from its messaging?
In my opinion, Disney's problem is not messaging, but phoning it on with tried-and-true recipes, and playing it safe instead of exploring what the medium can offer.
Comic book movies seem to be dethroning themselves. Super Mario coincidentally being #2 at the box office would be the sort of tipping point for the studios to hungrily eye an alternate source of IP to adapt. (https://www.boxofficemojo.com/year/world/2023/ - I will concede that FNAF is all the way at #18, which isn't very impressive).
I mean, they're already greenlighting nearly twenty Mattel based projects just because of Barbie (https://www.insider.com/all-upcoming-movies-mattel-toys-barbie-2023-7), it seems like Hollywood hasn't come a long way from the video's intro anecdote about how the original Batman movie ushered in a wave of adaptations of retro pulp heroes, rather than the more naturally lucrative choice of comic book adaptations. So who's to say they won't look at the similar success of The Super Mario Bros. Movie and mine video game IP for adaptations?
At the same time, I think that other than for Daniel Kaluuya's 'A24-Type' Barney movie, most of the Mattel projects are not even going to see the light of day. It's a much more limited IP vein and once there's a box office bomb or two, the studios will quickly put the kibosh on the outlandish idea. Battleship, for instance, didn't exactly unleash a huge trend of board game movies.
Outside of the theaters, The Last of Us being a huge hit and a critical darling would seem to indicate that after decades, we might finally be seeing the end of the video game adaptation curse. The fact that there are any quality video game adaptations now, let alone successful ones, is itself a sea change. And as the video theorizes, maybe this isn't 2008 so much as it's the early '00s when the original X-Men and Spider-Man adaptations came out. A sign of the shift that is to come. But I firmly do believe it so to come. There are far more video games than there are Marvel/DC superhero properties. More genres, even.
> I'm suddenly getting visions of the Super Mario Bros Movie.
My work here is done.
> Personally I think we need to start transitioning away from cars altogether. Trains and trams all the way baby!
Without the giant battery a car is almost an empty shell, like a people shipping container with windows. Perhaps we ca fit them on rails and link them together like a human centipede.
What makes this so surprising is that Charles has voiced Mario (as well as Luigi, Wario, Waluigi, etc) for over 30 years, with the recent Super Mario Bros Movie and the Japanese version of WarioWare Gold being some of the very few instances where he didn't voice his usual characters.
That's very rare in the entertainment industry. Most major franchises recast their characters at least once or twice in their lifetime, with the likes of James Bond and Doctor Who even justifying the change of cast in universe. Heck, I suspect only The Simpsons and certain soap operas have ever been a situation where the same character was played by the same actor for this amount of time or longer, and even there it's incredibly rare to see (most soap opera characters get written out of the show, and the main Simpsons cast being so consistent is still insane).
So it's like seeing your childhood icon change after decades here.
Still, I guess it was kinda inevitable. Martinet is nearing 70 at this point, and his portrayals of his characters in certain recent games (like Luigi's Mansion 3) have felt a bit rough compared to how they used to sound. So I suspect it was a case of 'better step back now while I can still train people how to do the relevant voices rather than be forced to quit because I can't do said voices at all anymore'
> movies don't just come out of thin air. A movie studio can only make a few $250m+ movies a year, so we get the movies we get.
New ones, yes, but what about old ones? It's not like they are broken or incompatible or something. Movies don't just disappear the day after box office weekend!
> No one who goes to see the, Avengers: End Game is going to also want to watch, Le Charme discret de la bourgeoisie - even on a lark.
So what? Show something else, then. There are thousands of movies out there to choose from, but there are only 19 showing today! Hell, you could pick one at random from IMDB's top 250, and it would probably fill more seats than yet another 4 daily showings of Evil Dead Rise.
Hell, one of the 19 they are actually showing is Ponyo. That came out in 2008! I bet it outsells at least 3 of the 4 Super Mario Bros. Movie showtimes.
Just because Netflix exists doesn't mean theaters are worthless without new content. What else is there to do around town?
A couple weeks ago, my dad was in town for a few hours. We went out for lunch, and tried to think of something else to do together. Our first thought was to go see a movie, but we weren't interested in a single one of the ones that were showing that day. Imagine that: dozens of theater screens all around the city, and nothing to watch. It's absurd how normal that is.
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I'm 100% sure Nintendo became Disney-esque right after the Super Mario Bros movie came out. They were completely embarrassed publicly for that. Before that they were just greedy cartridge licensers.
I don't know. A lot of small communities about very esoteric subjects tend to be both healthy and pretty much entirely positive. My secondary forum about the Wario series has a very upbeat atmosphere without too much in the way of disagreement, but that's only a thing because the subject itself only appeals to a limited amount of people. Same sort of thing with the forums I've seen based on the Super Mario Bros movie and the Mario RPG games.
But that's always going to be impossible if a community has a mainstream appeal, since large communities will inevitably have different groups with different interests and opinions, and Dunbar's Number means people can only retain super close relationships with between 100 and 250 people.