Despite crossover characters such as Fox McCloud appearing in The Super Mario Galaxy Movie, that doesn’t mean we should expect something akin to a Super Smash Bros. film any time soon.
That’s coming from none other than Nintendo’s Shigeru Miyamoto, who along with Illumination’s CEO Chris Meledandri has said that the film teams are focused solely on the task at hand right now, and aren’t planning to build their own cinematic universe like Marvel has done with The Avengers. At least, not yet.
“Right off the bat, I’ll say that unlike something like Super Smash Bros., I don’t think you’ll have a situation [where] all Nintendo characters would be joining. As you know, my rule is that Pikmin can appear in any [Nintendo] series,” Miyamoto explained to Polygon during a recent interview about The Super Mario Galaxy Movie.
“As we’re working on this movie, I re-realised how varied and multi-talented the Mario cast is. When we had kind of ideas from Illumination about, ‘What about this character? What about that character?’ I was like, ‘Oh yeah, that’s right. We had this. Oh yeah, that’s right. We had that character.’ So it really kind of reaffirmed the varied nature of characters in the Mario world. We have plenty of characters to create a movie, and yet we wanted to add a little bit of spice, a little bit of secret cameos here and there. And you’ll see that there’s one secret character that plays a big role.
“So I think there might be introductions of characters like this potentially in the future, something like that.”
Meledandri added that when the term “universe” is used, it “conjures up for me this idea that there’s a group of really smart people in a room with charts up on a wall and they’re planning the next 10 years of how all the characters might be weaving in and out of movies”. However, for Illumination and Nintendo, the “process is actually very different from that”.
“It’s much more geared toward conversations about what would be fun within a certain scene in the movie,” the movie exec continued. “So these ideas come up based on, ‘Oh, wouldn’t it be fun if the Pikmin appeared here? Wouldn’t that be fun?’ And then that conversation, if we agree that it’s a fun idea, then we look to Miyamoto-san to just make his own judgment about whether or not it feels right to him, but it’s much more incidental than strategic.”
The Super Mario Galaxy Movie is set to release today, 1st April. Along with heroes like Mario, Luigi, Peach and Rosalina, retro-enemy Wart will also be making their wicked return in the upcoming sequel, alongside Birdo and the black-clad Ninjis.
As for that secret character Miyamoto has said will have a big part in The Super Mario Galaxy Movie, well, I think I may know who he is referring to…
