Nintendo's last foray into feature films was such a disaster they've been gunshy about trying it again, or even loaning out their characters for others to use. That was 1993's Super Mario Bros., a wretched adaptation of the legendary game franchise featuring the world's most famous plumber. While a few of Nintendo's characters have popped up in Wreck-It Ralph and more recently in Pixels, it's been awhile since any of them have had their own movie. However, it looks like that may be about to change.
Nintendo recently struck a deal with Universal for theme parks featuring their roster of video game mascots, but that could be just the beginning. Speaking with Fortune, Nintendo's creative genius Shigeru Miyamoto suggests the company could be expanding into movies once more...
“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.”
There had been rumblings of a live-action Legend of Zelda series developing at Netflix, but Nintendo shot those rumors down. It would make sense for Nintendo to capitalize on their huge library of popular characters. Imagine a film that would have Mario, Luigi, Metroid, Donkey Kong, and Legend of Zelda's Link all together? How about a Super Smash Bros. movie? And naturally the franchise potential for each of those characters is huge, and likely too much for Nintendo to deny for long.
