Tag: Super Mario

The most memorable moms in games – for better and for worse

Moms in games are a rarity, but some manage to play unforgettable roles in RPGs, action games, and indies

Moms in games are a rare species. They tend to die or disappear for dramatic effect in RPGs, while mainstream action games in the last decade or so preferred to focus on dads and father figures. Some moms managed to survive the narrative process and play memorable – if not always substantial – roles. Some leave their mark by starting wars and being generally terrible to their kids. Others give up everything so their children can pursue their dreams, and one or two are just there to give you a helping hand when you need it. These are the moms in games that we won’t forget any time soon. 

 

Super Mario Bros. is already the highest grossing video game movie ever

Warcraft is no longer in the top spot.

Much to nobody’s surprise – the Super Mario Bros. Movie is now the highest-grossing video game film of all time.

As reported by The Numbers, the Super Mario Bros. Movie has already brought in roughly $678 million at the worldwide box office – swiftly kicking Warcraft, which earned $439 million during its theatrical run, out of the top spot.

It’s quite a feat, especially when you consider that the Super Mario Bros. Movie came out less than two weeks ago, on April 5, 2023. We’ll undoubtedly see these earnings shoot up dramatically as the weeks go on as well – many are predicting that this movie will be the first video game adaptation to cross a billion dollars, even.

For additional context regarding how well movies based on video games typically do at the box office: Detective Pikachu comes in third with $433 million, followed closely by Rampage at $427 million. Surprisingly, Sonic the Hedgehog 2, which saw a historic theatrical opening run, comes in fourth – you would think the franchise that arguably kicked off the era of solid video game adaptations would be higher up the list.

More films based on the Italian plumber’s adventures are likely coming, especially if that post-credits sequel tease is any sort of hint.

Written by Kyle Campbell on behalf of GLHF.

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The US government just awarded Super Mario Bros. a significant honor

The Super Mario Bros. theme is the first video game song inducted into the Library of Congress National Recording Registry

The Super Mario Bros. theme is the first video game song inducted into the Library of Congress National Recording Registry (thanks, The Guardian). The Library of Congress, an official extension of the United States government’s legislative branch, announced the classic NES game theme and 24 other songs, albums, and musical tidbits as part of “the defining sounds of the nation’s history and culture,” alongside Mariah Carey’s single “All I Want for Christmas Is You” (1994) and Madonna’s 1984 album Like A Virgin.

The Library called the Super Mario Bros. “Ground Theme,” which plays while Mario is aboveground in the original NES game, “the most recognizable video game theme in history.” The news comes a week after Nintendo and Illumination released the Super Mario Bros. Movie in theaters, which quickly shattered box office records and had the best opening five days of any animated movie, knocking Frozen 2 off its throne.

Not that the iconic theme had much to do with that success. While Koji Kondo composed the original Mario Bros. theme, much of his music and tracks from the Mario game series didn’t make their way to the film.

Other notables in this round of inductions include Queen Latifah, who became the first female rapper to have a recording admitted to the Library of Congress with her 1989 album All Hail the Queen and a set of commentaries and analysis from NBC reporter Dorothy Thompson on the state of Europe in 1939 leading up to World War II.

Written by Josh Broadwell on behalf of GLHF

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The Super Mario Bros. Movie is a perfectly fine video game flick

Great graphics and fun action, but nothing that really took it to the next level.

The Super Mario Bros. Movie leapt into theaters this week, opening April 5 ahead of the long Easter weekend. With a star-studded cast led by Chris Pratt (Mario), Jack Black (Bowser), Anya Taylor-Joy (Princess Peach) and Charlie Day (Luigi) and incredibly impressive graphics, expectations were high for a fun summer kids’ flick.

And… it was fine.

I wish I had a more exciting reaction to the video game-centered flick, but it was fine!

Storywise, it was very Super Mario. Bowser is doing bad things and is on his way to the Mushroom Kingdom to either woo Princess Peach or destroy everything. Mario and Luigi – human brothers that are trying to get their new plumbing business off the ground in Brooklyn – end up down a weird green pipe that sends them to another world.

The duo gets split up, with Luigi finding nothing but trouble and Mario winding up in the Mushroom Kingdom with Toad (Keegan-Michael Key) and the princess. The latter group sets off to get help from Cranky Kong (Fred Armisen), Donkey Kong (Seth Rogen) and the Kong army.

The graphics are stellar, and the music – both in the introduction of every Mario theme through the decades and the use of pop hits – was the highlight of the movie for me. I just thought it would have been funnier. Similar to other Illumination Studios projects like Despicable Me, Minions and Sing, The Super Mario Bros. Movie is a fun, inoffensive family film.

But when your cast is made up of genuinely funny comedians, I just thought we’d get a couple more laugh-out-loud moments.

The scenes that imitate the side-to-side scroll versions of Mario games or the Mario Kart turn on Rainbow Road are undeniably fun. It runs laps around any other version of Super Mario-related television or movie content, and the crowd in my theater gave it a rousing round of applause at the end.

It’s a fast-paced, high-energy romp that possibly gets weighed down by Mario definitely sounding like Chris Pratt doing the character Mario. Overall, it’s a perfectly fine movie and really not much more than that.

Future Mario games are unlikely to appear on mobile, hints Nintendo

Shigeru Miyamoto suggests that the iconic plumber works best on consoles.

Legendary game developer Shigeru Miyamoto, best known for creating franchises like The Legend of Zelda, Donkey Kong, Star Fox, and many other massive Nintendo franchises, isn’t too keen on the notion of Super Mario becoming a mobile-centric franchise.

During an interview with Variety, Miyamoto explained that Nintendo still wants the iconic plumber to be a vehicle for the company’s hardware.

“Mobile apps will not be the primary path of future Mario games,” Miyamoto said. “First and foremost, Nintendo’s core strategy is a hardware and software-integrated gaming experience.”

“The intuitiveness of the control is a part of the gaming experience,” Miyamoto continues. “When we explored the opportunity of making Mario games for the mobile phone – which is a more common, generic device – it was challenging to determine what that game should be. That is why I played the role of director for Super Mario Run, to be able to translate that Nintendo hardware experience into the smart devices.”

Miyamoto’s words are not all that surprising since the best Super Mario games have always made clever use of Nintendo’s often peculiar hardware – the 3DS, Wii, and Wii U immediately come to mind.

Of course, Nintendo did release numerous games for mobile platforms over the past few years – most notably, Super Mario Run, Dr. Mario World, Miitomo, and Mario Kart Tour.

Written by Kyle Campbell on behalf of GLHF.

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The Super Mario Movie post-credit scene may hint at a sequel

More Mario movies are reportedly in the works, Mario voice actor Chris Pratt teased in an interview, and you might see one of them soon

More Mario movies are apparently in the works, Mario voice actor Chris Pratt teased in a recent interview, and you might get a glimpse at one of them soon (thanks, IGN). 

“It mines this vein of sentiment and meaning from our childhood,” Pratt said. “You have all of this feeling that you almost don’t even realize, going into the movie, how much you care about these characters until you see the outfits, and you hear the music, and you hear the score. So get ready for a lot of these movies.”

While that may just be speculation based on how the cast and crew think the Super Mario Bros. movie will perform, Pratt suggested the film’s post-credit sequence hints at a new movie that may or may not be based on Luigi’s Mansion. He had nothing more definitive to say on the matter, aside from saying he heard there had “been talk” about the project.

Luigi’s Mansion was a launch game for the Nintendo Gamecube in 2001, a spinoff where Mario’s cowardly brother – the “damsel in distress” in the upcoming movie, with Peach empowered as a proper ruler – searches a haunted house for traces of the Big M after he goes missing. Mario is famously absent in the game, so if Pratt has only heard talk about it and not actually worked on the film, that would make sense.

Whatever the case, we won’t have much longer to wait for the tease. The Super Mario Bros. movie releases April 5, 2023, in theaters.

Written by Josh Broadwell on behalf of GLHF

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Anya Taylor-Joy said she makes Princess Peach “an empowered woman”

Anya Taylor-Joy, the voice actor for Princess Peach in the Super Mario Bros. movie, said she sees Peach as an empowering role model

Anya Taylor-Joy, the voice actor for Princess Peach in the Super Mario Bros. Movie, said she made the Mushroom Kingdom monarch an empowering role model – and was pleased to find she wasn’t the only one. Taylor-Joy, speaking on the Total Film podcast, said she was “impressed and excited” to discover that the film’s creators also envisioned Peach as a strong, capable leader.

“I’m really proud to be a part of this, and I’m proud to be a part of… Peach is an empowered woman,” she said. “And if you think about it – and this is when I get really nerdy – if you think about the storyline, it makes more sense that she’s strong and in control, because she is the ruler of the Mushroom Kingdom. And that’s not an easy job. So if she was constantly being plucked out of her castle, she wouldn’t be very good at ruling, would she?”

The only other time Nintendo’s fungal aristocrat held a leading role was in 2005’s Super Princess Peach for the Nintendo DS. The game drew some criticism for doing away with traditional Mario powers and replacing them with Peach’s extreme emotions.

Taylor-Joy said that Nintendo and Illumination struck what she believes is a strong balance between the fresh and familiar for every character that longtime series fans and newcomers alike will enjoy. The idea echoes what the film’s directors previously said, when they called Luigi the film’s “damsel in distress” who Mario would do anything to rescue.

The Super Mario Bros. Movie releases on April 5, 2023, in theaters.

Written by Josh Broadwell on behalf of GLHF

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Disturbing classic Mario manga panel shows where 1-Up Mushrooms grow

A panel from a classic 1996 Super Mario manga resurfaced online and raised some eyebrows over its depiction of the Mushroom Kingdom

A panel from a classic 1996 Super Mario manga resurfaced online and raised some eyebrows over its depiction of the Mushroom Kingdom’s darker side (thanks, Kotaku). Twitter user Supper Mario Broth, who shares interesting and bizarre facts about Mario history, posted the panel, which, on the surface seems totally normal and Mario-like. The top half is dominated by a large Super Mushroom or 1-Up Mushroom. Nothing weird here – yet.

The bottom half shows the mushroom’s stalk snaking down below the earth and taking root in a corpse. Mario’s corpse. The same Mario you let fall off a ledge or miss a tough jump with. He’s dead now, but in his death comes new life, apparently.

Fans reacted with mock horror and disgust.

“Does the 1-Up Mushroom contain Mario’s consciousness,” one wrote “Does he remember every time he died?”

Another was less surprised. “Considering how strange the field of mycology is in real life… yeah this is believable.”

 

Supper Mario Broth followed up with a tweet saying the manga in question was never officially endorsed by Nintendo and produced some bizarre Mario lore theories that Nintendo would probably never sanction.

Unlike Zelda, with its multiple timelines, and the lore-heavy Metroid series, Mario tends to be light on story in favor of action. That might change with the Super Mario Bros. movie when it releases in April, though.

Written by Josh Broadwell on behalf of GLHF

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The final Super Mario movie trailer gives a brief Mario Odyssey tease

Nintendo and Illumination released the final Super Mario movie trailer, and it shows a brief glimpse of a familiar Mario Odyssey location

Nintendo and Illumination released the final Super Mario movie trailer, and it shows a brief glimpse of a familiar Mario Odyssey location. For a scant second, we see Mario and Princess Peach walking through the deserts of Tostarena, the second planet Mario visits in the Switch game.

It’s there for a brief moment only with the large floating pyramid depicted in the background, sandwiched between a scene where a cannon is poised to fire someone into the sky, and Bowser rallies his minions. It’s the first time outside Peach’s Palace itself that we’ve seen a familiar location in the Mario movie. Previous trailers showed a new take on Bowser’s castle and the Mushroom Kingdom, alongside some locations inspired by the games, including a penguin kingdom.

Perhaps Mario and Peach accidentally overshoot their destination and find themselves in Tostarena on the way to fight Bowser, or perhaps Nintendo and Illumination are taking a “kitchen sink” approach and tossing in as many Mario references as they can. Despite Rosalina – presumably – not making an appearance in the movie, the new trailer shows a lone Luma with a sadistic streak imprisoned in Bowser’s castle.

The trailer ends with an extended look at the Mushroom crew racing down the iconic Rainbow Road Mario Kart course, a nice nod to the Nintendo theme park’s signature ride perhaps.

The Super Mario Bros. movie releases in theaters on April 5, 2023, a few days earlier than its original intended release date.

Written by Josh Broadwell on behalf of GLHF

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Super Mario movie directors say Luigi is the damsel in distress now

The Super Mario Bros movie is just around the corner, and directors Aaron Horvath and Michael Jelenic spoke about what they wanted for Peach

The Super Mario Bros movie is just around the corner, and directors Aaron Horvath and Michael Jelenic spoke with film magazine Total Film about what they wanted from Luigi and Peach (thanks, Nintendo Life). While the Mushroom Kingdom princess often takes a passive role in Mario games, usually as the object of a kidnapping scheme like in Super Mario Odyssey, Horvath and Jelenic wanted to take a different approach.

Rather than Peach getting swiped from her castle once again, the movie trailers show her leading a war council and developing plans to deal with the Bowser situation.

“[Peach is] the monarch who leads this kingdom of hapless, adorable Toads,” Horvath and Jelenic said. “We were thinking how strong that person would need to be to protect those people. All that informed the idea for Peach’s character in our movie.”

However, Mario has to have someone to rescue, and in Illumination’s movie, that someone is Luigi.

“It’s Mario’s goal to save his brother from Bowser’s clutches,” Horvath and Jelenic said. “He has to go on this epic adventure to do that. So Luigi, who’s a famously nervous, anxious character, finds himself in the worst possible predicament: having to survive interrogations with Bowser, and make it through that gauntlet.”

Whether Luigi’s nerves survive this ordeal after three haunted house incidents and a rather embarrassing fashion day at the tennis courts remains to be seen. Still, with just one game – Super Princess Peach – that let the Mushroom monarch shine, it’s about time someone else bears the brunt of Bowser’s wrath.

Written by Josh Broadwell on behalf of GLHF

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