Yeah! With Mario Lopez as a plucky young sidekick, some Mario Lanza music interspersed with the original score, and Mario Andretti as consultant for the Mario Kart segment
My wife went to see it with my daughter. They both said the same thing. Decent family popcorn one-off movie.
Yup. Saw this 3D today and was frankly bored. Am I way too old for the target audience? Sure, but that's true for 100s of movies I love as well. This one felt like they made up action scenes based on the various games and then constructed a lousy narrative around it. Completely trite, by the numbers and banal. Not a laugh or moment of actual fun to be had in this tiresome dud.
I think you have the structure of the movie right Oatsdad. I'm not the biggest Mario fan but I recognised all the characters. I could see pretty quickly the plot points of the recent Trolls film and a lift from Shrek with the helpful mushroom. It's not original but the target audience does not care. This movie benefited financially from one thing - it was the first big scale animated movie in 4 months. The last one was Puss in Boots - The Last Wish which is from Christmas time. Most megaplexes were still playing the movie until Super Mario opened.
Saw it with my 8 year old today. We both liked it. It was fun seeing all the nods to other Nintendo games.
Finally got around to watching this. I'm pretty well in the adult demographic they were aiming for on this movie (to the degree they were aiming for an adult demographic). This film was not targeted at "gamers" as such, but people who remember playing the game in the 80s and 90s. And I played the NES games for many, many, many hours. I had very minimal expectations going in; I knew this would be light fluff. But I was pretty stunned how boring and barebones this thing was. Zero attempt has been made to inject any real story into this film. No theme or characterization is present beyond the very thin surface. And I think I know why. We all know the 1993 film was considered a bomb on all levels, critically and financially. Normally, a studio wouldn't weigh a 30-year-old situation *that* heavily when looking to make another one. But clearly Nintendo has and still does. It took them 30 years to greenlight another one, and I think this new film is very specifically the anti-1993 film. The 1993 film was derided for trying to add a bunch of lore and weird stuff, which was both hated and/or found to be completely at odds with the actual game. I think Nintendo in 2023 seems to feel that *any* additional lore or story or characterization risks moving the film away from the most basic, blunt, simple aesthetic of the games that attracts people to it. Thus, you have this 2023 film that is, on a script level, almost a weird type of anti-film. Some have said stuff like "it's like just watching video game cut scenes", but I think that's an insult to some video game cut scenes. This new movie is more like simply watching someone play through several levels of a new Mario game, and doing an absolutely run of the mill job of it. I say all this as someone who can easily be attracted to the nostalgia of the old NES games. And sure, I found a few easter eggs in this film to be cute (the Punch Out and Duck Hunt references early on), and occasionally I saw the film present wholesale things from the old games (the suits, the music, etc.), and that was momentarily fun here and there. But there's no movie here really. It feels completely threadbare, and also even at 90 minutes also feels too long. It feels like Nintendo came through and struck from the script anything that could possibly be actual character development or plot content. The script feels like someone scribbled a combo of the basic events from a few Mario movies on the back of a cocktail napkin, and they just went ahead and recorded that. There are barely any jokes to fall back on. It can't even find solace in turning into a parody sort of thing, like a PG "Harley Quinn" that pokes fun at itself. I'm surprised that I was surprised by how barren this film was. It's nice to look at I guess, but there are so many other pretty CGI films out there that have at least *something* to chew on. This movie is so paper-thin in terms of story and plot; I kind of find it fascinating. I feel like I never need to watch any of it ever again, but that I also need to watch it and study it for some reason.
Happy MAR 10 day, everyone! As announced today: The Super Mario Bros. Movie sequel is coming in 2026 MAR10 Day 2024 video from Nintendo's Youtube channel:
