Nintendo Fever: Which games will get the Super Mario Bros. Movie treatment next?

With The Super Mario Bros. Movie unleashed in theaters, we look at 9 other beloved Nintendo franchises and see how they'd fare on the screen

By William Hughes | April 6, 2023 | 12:00pm

Film Features Nintendo

Nintendo Fever: Which games will get the Super Mario Bros. Movie treatment next?

Image: Universal Pictures

This week, after a year-plus of dedicated hype, Nintendo and Illumination are unleashing The Super Mario Bros. Movie into theaters—the first serious step (alongside the recent opening of Super Nintendo World at Universal Studios, earlier this year) in what’s likely to be a major media push by the beloved video game brand. And while the critical response to the Mario movie has been muted, trending “rotten,” that doesn’t seem to have done much to quiet the enthusiasm of movie-goers desperate to hear Chris Pratt declare, once and for all, that it’s-a-him: The film is currently projected at a $125 million debut, the biggest of 2023 to date.

Which suggests that, after decades of attempts—and a few fascinating failures—the world might finally be ready for Nintendo to take one of the planet’s most beloved collections of intellectual property and start throwing it at the American movie market like they’re barrels in the hands of an angry Kong. Or, to put it another way: You don’t think Hollywood is going to let Nintendo pass up all the potential money of a Zelda movie, do you?

Hence this survey of the Nintendo corpus as a whole, trying to figure out which of the company’s beloved properties are most likely for a cinematic reinvention, now that everybody’s favorite plumber has cleared the way. For your reading convenience/appropriate calibration of hopes, we’ve arranged these picks in order of certainty, ranging from “Will almost certainly happen” to “Not in a million years (but it’d be damn cool if they did).” (Oh, and we’re leaving out Pokémon, the only Nintendo brand that’s ever even come close to being a success at the international box office; take it as read that we’ll be getting a few more of those movies in Mario’s fireball-hurling wake.)

The “We’d Bet Money On It” Pick: The Legend Of Zelda

There is no universe in which The Super Mario Bros. Movie makes several hundred million dollars at the box office that is not also a universe in which Nintendo decides to see if its other biggest games franchise can post similar numbers. People have tried to float Zelda film projects in the past, but Nintendo always balked, reportedly skittish after the total failure of the original Mario movie back in the 1990s. But with that failure now due to be “redeemed,” we’re reasonably sure green-clad elf-boy Link will be headed to theaters some time in the near future. What would a Zelda movie even look like? Your guess is as good as ours: The action-adventure franchise is, if anything, even more mercurial than the Mario games, switching settings and tones liberally between each games. (The massively successful would be a good starting point for a narrative, although a throwback to SNES favorite A Link To The Past is at least as likely.) But the real key—as the lead-up to the Mario movie suggests—will be in the film’s ability to use the signifiers of the franchise to grab players/viewers firmly by the nostalgia. A green tunic, a glimpse of the Master Sword, a few notes of gaming’s most iconic theme tune? The movie might not write itself, but that’s half the trailer right there.

The “Pretty Decent Shot” Pick: Kirby

HAL Laboratory’s little pink eating machine has already proven his viability on the small screen, starring in a four-season TV series, Right Back At Ya!, in the early 2000s. But the more important consideration here is that no other hero in Nintendo’s library is better suited to be tossed straight to Super Mario Bros. Movie creators Illumination than Kirby, a brightly colored, brain-light ball of cuteness perfectly centered in the studio’s comic mischief wheelhouse. The Kirby games take place in beautifully colored worlds, filled with adorable designs; meanwhile, Kirby’s own ability to absorb the powers of anything he eats is basically Animation Heaven: Nintendo designers have spent the last several decades assembling dozens of fantastical forms for the lil’ guy to take on that are just begging for a big screen treatment.

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The “Tumblr Will Eat It Up” Pick: Splatoon

Nintendo’s idiosyncratic crack at the multiplayer shooter market has always run on equal parts style and shockingly solid shooting action, with just a hint of bizarro plot shenanigans thrown in for good measure. The result is a series that would translate to film incredibly well, and incredibly easily: The franchise’s heroes, the squid-like Inklings, already have nigh-iconic designs, and the world they live in has just enough of a flavor of apocalyptic doom to make the whole thing interesting. What Splatoon lacks in pure name recognition it could easily make up for in how easy it is to grasp as a concept: Super-hip squid kids play high-impact paintball in the wreckage of our world. It’s a sports movie and a war movie: What’s not to like?

The “50/50 Odds” Pick: Metroid

Alright, this is the dividing line: The point where our ability to predict the market, and the ever-ineffable whims of Nintendo, start to break down. Because, on the one hand, Metroid is an incredibly powerful brand in gaming circles; it contains some of the most beloved games of all time, including a very . On the other hand, it’s a franchise that anyone who isn’t deeply immersed in gaming is likely to be pretty neutral on. (Although, to be fair, that hasn’t stopped Hollywood producers—most notably John Woo, of all people—from taking a swing at the film rights from time to time.) The bigger problem with a Metroid movie, though, is tonal: The best games in the franchise operate almost entirely in silence, creating a slow, steady feeling of isolation as one-woman army Samus Aran cuts her way through space pirates and parasites alike. Any movie adaptation is going to be tempted to talk things up—flesh out Samus’ backstory, or, god forbid, give her someone to periodically converse with. And that would be death for a series like Metroid, which is as much about the feeling of being alone in a very hostile place as any of the franchise’s iconic visual designs.

The “Eh, It Could Happen” Pick: Star Fox

Honestly, the only reason this franchise isn’t higher on the adaptation list is that Nintendo seems to have mostly forgotten that its series of space dog (and cat, and frog)-fighting sims is still around. Certainly, all the ingredients for a decent movie adaptation are here: Well-designed but simple characters with obvious personality hooks; cool-looking spaceships; tons of visual spectacle in the form of massive, intricate space battles. Sure, you’d have to explain to the kids why the nice fox pilot and the evil wolf pilot are trying to murder each other in the midst of an intergalactic war, but, on the other hand: A decent Star Fox movie would sell a ludicrous number of toys. (And if we get another actual Star Fox game out of it for the first time in years, so much the better.)

The “Only If Zelda Makes A Billion Bucks” Pick: Fire Emblem

Despite the prominence they’ve picked up from regular bouts in the super-popular Smash Bros. games—ever hungry, as they are, for one more dude or lady with a sword to round out their casts—the Fire Emblem strategy games have always been more of a going concern in their native Japan than in the United States. That being said, if Hollywood does decide to take the plunge, it could herald a more mature direction for the Nintendo adaptation market; the Fire Emblem games tell significantly more thoughtful stories than the rest of the company’s output, tales of war and friendships tested on the battle. (Also: Lots of smooching, via the series’ famed Support system, which puts an especial emphasis on the bonds between your troops.) A Fire Emblem movie would be a slam dunk, actually—provided you could get over the name recognition problem first, which would be a lot easier if Zelda primes the pump for video-game fantasy.

The “Problematic Fave” Pick: Punch-Out!!

There is so much to recommend Punch-Out!! as a film concept. The boxing movie is, of course, a long-cherished institution in Hollywood. And the franchise—which dates all the way back to the arcades in 1984, before moving to home consoles with a celebrated NES version in 1987—features some of the most intricate character designs in Nintendo’s whole library.And if a decent fraction of those designs weren’t, y’know, based on obvious national or racial stereotypes, we might be in business. To be fair, the most recent Punch-Out!! game, the 2009 Wii title, tried to dial things back slightly—or at least render them more cartoonish, and less outright offensive. But this is still a franchise that starts at “French people are bad at fighting and like baguettes” and works its way up from there; figuring out a way to make this work without getting (rightly) pilloried would whip up more of a sweat than following Doc Lewis’ bike on a jog through New York City.

The “Maybe A TV Show Instead?” Pick: Animal Crossing

This is another “so close it hurts” movie idea: Nintendo’s laid-back village simulator, Animal Crossing, has a massive fanbase, instantly recognizable characters, and even. What it doesn’t have is a plot, conflict, or any kind of stakes, and those are often considered important for movies. Worse, its whole premise is antithetical to the idea of ratcheting up tension at all; sure, there might be a story in Blathers the owl’s endless compulsion to collect bugs he hates in his ever-expanding museum. But unless we’ve got the Duplass brothers on hand to mumblecore the whole thing up, any expansions of Animal Crossing into the world of video might be better suited to the small screen, where viewers can more easily just … chill.