Super Mario Bros Animated Movie Will Release “Around 2022”

According to Nintendo, its new Super Mario Bros animated movie with Illumination Entertainment won’t be releasing until “around 2022.”

The news comes way of Nintendo’s latest financial results — more specifically page 16 of the briefing — where Nintendo noted that “the development of an animated film based on ‘Super Mario Bros‘ with Illumination is moving along for an anticipated theatrical release around 2022.”

Now, “around 2022” is pretty vague. This seems to suggest that 2022 is the internal target, but is subject to change, and that the animated movie could arrive a little bit before, 2021, or a little bit after, 2023.

Beyond a release window, Nintendo unfortunately doesn’t divulge any further details on the project, which we likely won’t be hearing about in any detail for a couple of years.

For those that don’t know: Illumination Entertainment is an American film and animation studio founded by Chris Meledandri in 2007 that is owned by Universal Pictures. The studio is best known for the Despicable Me franchise, as well as Sing and The Secret Life of Pets.

It has three movies in the 50 highest-grossing films ever, and six in the 50 highest-grossing animated films of all time, with Minions at third specifically.

In other words, it’s a successful studio, one with a lot of talent that can do the Mario IP justice, and help buck the trend that movies based on or within video games, are, usually, pretty awful.

And from the sounds of it, the studio has worked with Nintendo and the creator of Mario, Shigeru Miyamoto, very closely throughout the process.

“We are keeping him front and center in the creation of this film,” said the aforementioned Meledandri while speaking about Miyamoto and the project to Variety. “I’ve rarely seen that happen with any adaptation where the original creative voice is being embraced like we’re embracing Miyamoto. There’s a history in Hollywood of people believing that they know better than the people responsible for a property. I’ve made that mistake before.”

Anyway, as always, feel free to leave a comment letting us know what you think or hit me up on Twitter @Tyler_Fischer_to chat there. What are you hoping to see from this movie? Personally, I’m hoping Waluigi makes an appearance of some sort, if not purely to see the Internet go crazy.