Nintendo’s creative overlord Shigeru Miyamoto has been taken aback by the negative reviews received by The Super Mario Galaxy Movie, which he helped make.
Miyamoto was speaking to Japanese publication Famitsu ahead of The Super Mario Galaxy Movie’s slightly delayed Japanese release (it launches there tomorrow, 24th April). It was after Famitsu likened this film’s situation, of having strong commercial performance overseas but low-scoring reviews, to the situation faced by The Super Mario Bros. Movie in 2023, that Miyamoto said:
“Certainly it is a similar situation. Actually I thought that the opinions of reviewers for the previous film make sense. I thought this film wouldn’t be judged as harshly as the previous one, but it actually received even harsher reviews. It’s strange that, despite bringing in many people from different genres to energise the film industry, those who were supposed to play a leading role in revitalising it were rather passive.”
This translation was handled independently by Eurogamer through a Japanese contact, incidentally, because there are varying translations of this quote being reported.
The Super Mario Galaxy Movie has been wildly successful at the box office, becoming the highest earning film of 2026 so far and surpassing $755 million-and-counting in revenue. But the reviews have been low-to-scathing, with Eurogamer’s own The Super Mario Galaxy Movie review awarding two stars. “There’s imagination and enthusiasm here, but little else beneath the spectacle,” wrote Christian Donlan.
Review aggregation site Rotten Tomatoes puts The Super Mario Galaxy Movie’s average critic score at 49 percent, as of the time of writing, whereas The Super Mario Bros. Movie fared slightly better with an average of 59 percent. In both cases, the audience response was significantly higher: 89 percent for Galaxy, and 95 percent for Bros.
Miyamoto went on to talk about the project’s gestation, and he made it sound as though pre-production was stricter for the first film than the second. Miyamoto apparently spent nearly six years working with writer Matthew Vogel to get the first film right. “He would initially provide me with a few plot outlines, but for the first film, we had to redo them several times because they weren’t quite right,” Miyamoto said, in a translation this time provided by DeepL Translate.
“The reason was that when making the first film, I didn’t think it would be interesting to simply adapt the game directly into a film. Games are fun because you play them, and I started from the premise that simply turning that into a film narrative wouldn’t result in something entertaining. However, the end result of the first film was that, surprisingly, it ended up following the same flow as the game.”
Because this introduction to the world of Mario had been handled by the first film, it enabled the team to take “a more relaxed approach” to the second film, The Super Mario Galaxy Movie. “We simply wanted viewers to enjoy this film, even if they were new to the series,” Miyamoto said. Perhaps that’s where some of the film’s looser shape comes from.
Elsewhere, Miyamoto touched briefly on the inclusion of Star Fox ace pilot Fox McCloud in the movie, who’s voiced by Top Gun star Glen Powell. He said that usually Nintendo has strict rules about mixing brands in games, though not in Super Smash Bros., which is entirely about mixing brands. “However, if we’re moving towards making films, I thought it might be okay to relax those constraints a little,” Miyamoto said.
The appearance of Fox in the film has bolstered speculation that a Switch 2 Star Fox game is going to be unveiled and then released this year. The current rumour is that the game is going to be announced this month, and there are seven days left of April to go.
