Well, it’s here: The moment Nintendo fans have been nervously awaiting since Chris Pratt was first announced as the voice of Mario in Illumination’s Super Mario Bros. Movie a little over a year ago. Nintendo and Illumination have just released the first trailer for the movie, giving us all a chance to not only hear Pratt’s Mario but to see what the studio behind the Minions movies can do with the mushroom kingdom. We know they have experience with cute/funny little guys, and everybody in the Mario universe is a cute/funny little guy to some extent, but is the movie going to be a “wahoo!” or an “ohhh noooo”?
That’s an intensely personal decision that everyone will have to come to on their own, much like when the first trailer for the Sonic The Hedgehog movie came out (though most people landed on the “too many teeth” side of that debate, prompting a massive and costly redo on the finished footage). Still, the team behind the movie have been consistently promising that Pratt’s Mario voice would not only be good, but that everyone would stop questioning the decision to cast him once they hear what he’s doing, so they’ve been confident for a long time that it won’t be as bad as Sonic’s teeth.
We’ll see about that, and we’re sure that everyone on social media will loudly tell everybody how they feel about it. You can see the trailer for yourself below at the end of this video.
The Super Mario movie will be released in the United States on April 7, 2023. It was directed by Teen Titans Go! visionaries Aaron Horvath and Michael Jelenic, and in addition to Pratt, it stars Anya Taylor-Joy as Princess Peach, Charlie Day as Luigi, Seth Rogen as Donkey Kong, Keegan-Michael Key as Toad, and Jack Black as Bowser.