It feels like it was only yesterday that the internet was collectively losing their minds at the absurdity of Chris Pratt playing the iconic Super Mario, yet here we are two years after the release of The Super Mario Bros. Movie, one of the most successful animated movies of all time, and suddenly the reality of the Nintendo Cinematic Universe is setting in. We expected a long wait to hear anything from the next Nintendo movie, but we’re halfway through 2025 and we already have release dates for Nintendo’s next two movies – and they’re coming back to back.
Next year sees the release of the sequel to The Super Mario Bros. Movie, which a leak suggests could be titled ‘Super Mario World’. Releasing in early April 2026, that’s almost exactly three years after the first movie. However, just one year later in March 2027, Nintendo will be releasing their live-action The Legend of Zelda movie. We’ve got two years coming up with a Nintendo movie in each, and we can’t help but wonder if Nintendo might give Hollywood’s yearly movie schedule a try.
The Super Mario Bros. Success
Before we look at the possibility of a yearly Nintendo movie release schedule, it’d be smart to start by addressing why they would want to do it. The Super Mario Bros. Movie was a resounding success by the majority of metrics, and we know Nintendo pride themselves on their acclaim. Critically speaking, whilst it received a 59% on Rotten Tomatoes from critics, audiences around the world overwhelmingly enjoyed the film, giving it a massive 95% score on the same platform. CinemaScore audiences also polled the film at an A rating, an impressively high grade for a brand new family movie.
As we know, Nintendo also likes money, and they made a lot of it from the adaptation of the Super Mario Bros. on the big screen. From a budget of $100 million, The Super Mario Bros. Movie made a whopping $1.36 billion dollars, the first video game adaptation to ever cross $1 billion worldwide. With just a single release, Nintendo wiped the awful 1993 Mario movie away from its memory, with Mario now known as not just being a gaming icon, but one of cinema too. We knew they’d make more movies, this experiment was too successful to not follow up, but we didn’t expect how eager they’d be with what comes next.
The two year experiment of Mario and Zelda
As we said earlier in the article, Nintendo is releasing the sequel to The Super Mario Bros. Movie next year, and The Legend of Zelda movie comes the year after that. This is a rapid turn-around of a sequel compared to just how long we waited for the first Mario movie. It was the start of 2018 when Nintendo agreed to partner with Illumination and Universal for a Mario movie, and after two years of discussions, production started in 2020. It was five years total to discuss, workshop and produce the first Mario movie, but it has only taken another three to get the entire sequel ready to release. Perhaps Nintendo had this all planned out though, and that’s what makes us think we could be seeing an intentional yearly release schedule.
If it takes three years to fully produce a Mario movie, then we could expect to see the next one in 2029. We already know we have a Zelda movie coming in 2027, so all Nintendo has to do is announce a movie for 2028 and we’ll have a Nintendo Cinematic Universe building in no time. The exciting part is that there’s so much potential to do so, and it all feels so realistic now. Based on teases within the Mario Bros. Movie and rumblings around parts of the movie industry, both a Luigi’s Mansion movie and a Donkey Kong movie both seem like good potential candidates for future releases. That’s two films that could be in some degree of production, and we only have one yearly movie slot we need filling. Even outside of the Mario universe, Nintendo has so many franchises they could whip up a movie for over the next three years, and Pokémon is meant to come back to the big screen some time too. It’s hard to believe for long-time Nintendo fans that we’re really at this point, but all signs show Nintendo is massively ramping up its movie output.
The Nintendo way
There is one thing that could either be seen as a help or a hindrance to Nintendo and the idea of yearly movie output though, and that is the classic Nintendo way of doing things. Nintendo are perfectionists. They don’t release games with a lot of bugs, they don’t like to rush their projects, and if something needs to take a lot of time to be finalised then they’ll do so – just look at how long we were all waiting for The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom! Nintendo might have a lot in the works for future movie releases, there is a lot of potential on what they could do, but it needs to be done properly.
We’ve seen the successes and failures of cinematic universes that rush out their releases with the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU). They released a couple of movies a year, and for many years it was a fun time for audiences across the globe to see one or two big action movies a year that all fed into each other to create the ultimate cinematic experience that was Avengers: Endgame. However, we’ve recently seen what happens when Marvel gets too ambitious and too lazy, with rushed releases, an overly-stacked slate and subpar quality products leading to a reduced audience, reduced box office and even some projects failing to break-even with their budgets against the box office. We’d love to see a thriving and active Nintendo universe come to life at the cinema, but not at the cost of the soul and joy of each individual project. If future movies after the back-to-back Mario and Zelda take time, we’ll wait.
Do you think Nintendo could be heading towards a yearly movie release schedule? Is that what you would want to see if each movie was high quality, or do you think there’s a value in holding back too? Let us know all your thoughts on the cinematic future of Nintendo in the comments down below, and keep your eyes on GameLuster for more breaking gaming news and opinions like this.
