Illumination’s Chris Pratt as Mario, Anya Taylor-Joy as Princess Peach, Charlie Day as Luigi, Jack Black as Bowser, Seth Rogen as Donkey Kong, and Keegan Michael Key as Toad. While there’s certainly plenty of talent within that ensemble, it may not be enough to save the Super Mario movie from the traps of the past.
In 1993, Nintendo attempted to bring the Mario universe to the big screen in a very different way. The resulting live-action feature - which starred Bob Hoskins, John Leguizamo, and Dennis Hopper - was a baffling and almost unrecognizable rendition of the video games, transposing the Mushroom Kingdom and its various characters into a dystopian metropolis and leaning hard into the Mario brothers’ canonical occupation as plumbers. Needless to say, the film was poorly received, setting an unfortunate precedent for decades of video game adaptations to come.
As an animated feature, the new Mario film is already set to be closer to the video games than its predecessor, but the recent Super Mario Bros: The Movie cast announcements have caused some concern, and with good reason. The impressive assemblage of stars evokes other recent Illumination movies like Sing and the Despicable Me franchise – some of which have been successful, but none of which are accurate to the tone and feel of the established Mario series. Once again, it looks like the franchise’s essence may be getting sacrificed to make it fit more cleanly onto a preexisting movie template. For those who’ve come to love the Super Mario video games, that could be bad news.
The biggest challenge with any Mario movie is transferring the franchise’s beloved characters – characters who barely ever speak in the games – into a format where they must inherently be more developed and verbose. In other words, how do you make them talk while still keeping the essence of the original Super Mario characters? It’s a difficult challenge, and the answer isn’t immediately clear, but it certainly isn’t to superimpose generic archetypes from other recent animated movies onto Mario, Luigi, and the rest of the Super Mario Bros: The Movie characters.
1993’s Super Mario Bros. movie failed in part because it was too weird, but more so because it abandoned most of what made Mario beloved by so many. Now, with a cast that could easily be slotted into any other animated feature, Illumination’s Mario movie is risking the exact same problem. The movie itself hasn’t been shown in any form yet, of course, and the final product could still turn out to be great. Right now, though, it looks like Super Mario Bros: The Movie has some major obstacles to overcome if it wants to avoid the pitfalls of its predecessor.
