Open Channel: What’d You Think of the Super Mario Bros. Movie?

Just a few months in, and 2023 is already shaping up to be a fairly impressive year for movies. After a little bit of a delay, Illumination and Nintendo released their CG Super Mario Bros. movie earlier in the week.

And boy, it’s got folks divided. While the animation is a generally agreed upon highlight of the film, along with its original score and Jack Black’s Bowser, other parts of the movie aren’t as clear cut. Some have been able to enjoy it as a bog standard kids film with plenty of refences to the Mario franchise (and the larger library of Nintendo classics) to delight fans and a fun, zippy energy that makes it a good time in its own right. Conversely, others have found it to be just kind of a slog, going through the motions and coasting by on needle drops and Illumination’s humor staples for 90 minutes.

Admittedly, the Mario movie was always going to be a tricky thing to approach in a boom of video game adaptations we currently find ourselves in. Nintendo’s had a grip on the popular culture for decades through various franchises, and Mario is arguably their strongest soldier. Fact is, whatever one feels about the movie itself or the casting of A-listers like Black, Chris Pratt, and Anya Taylor-Joy, Nintendo and Illumination had already won pretty much the moment they dropped the first trailer. All it had to do was not be the widely disliked 1993 movie, a bar which it appears to have easily cleared.

So yeah, let us know what you think of the Mario movie in he comments below. And tell us what you’d like to see in the inevitable sequel they’ll be doing—this thing’s made a ton of money in this first half-week alone, and you have to imagine Nintendo now wants Illumination to do as many of these movies as possible.

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