The Super Mario Bros. Moviecontinues to be a massive success. Quickly becomingthe highest-grossing video game adaptation everas it sailed past $800 million last weekend, it will likely hit $1 billion very soon as the movie hasn’t even been released in Japan yet.Nintendoboss Shigeru Miyamoto has been blown away by the film’s success, admitting he thinks the somewhat negative critic reviews the movie received at the start of its run actually helped it achieve massive financial success.
“While many foreign critics have given the movie relatively low ratings, I think that also contributed to the movie’s notoriety and buzz,” Miyamoto told press in Japan ahead of the movie’s launch there this weekend (thanks toVGCfor the translation). “I did have a level of expectations that this movie would also do well [likeSuper Nintendo World], but I was very surprised that it went beyond what I could have imagined when it finally came out.”
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Hype for the Mario movie was high ahead of its arrival, but it did feel like some of the wind was taken out of its sails as reviews started to drop. It currently sits at 59 percent onRotten Tomatoes, the lack of any meaningful story making way for references and easter eggs one of the leading reasons for the relatively low scores. However, once the film was in cinemas, its audience score told a different story.
At 96 percent, it’s fair to say the critics and the fans don’t see eye-to-eye. As Miyamoto highlights though, if anything, bad reviews generated even more buzz for the film. Whether it be moviegoers who didn’t care how strong a story the movie told, or people simply wanting to see it for themselves, the Nintendo boss may be right in saying critics giving the movie middling scores resulted in the film falling more prominently on people’s radars.
The other biggest talking point to come out of what Miyamoto had to say this week was the reveal thatthe Mario movie has a different script in Japan. Miyamoto explained Nintendo handled the Japanese script and wanted to make changes as a one-to-one translation would have risked some of the nuance being lost on Japanese Mario fans. I had wondered what Jack Black’s Peaches might sound like when performed by Bowser’s Japanese voice actor.
The Mario movie may well be a very different experience for Japanese fans for a number of reasons. Not only does the film have its own unique script, butthe name of Foreman Spike has also been changed, and for good reason. Spike has been known as Blackie in Japan since his introduction. Nintendo confirmed his name has officially been changed ahead of the movie’s arrival.
