It's been nearly a year since the massively successful Super Mario animated film released in theaters and despite polarizing reactions, a sequel is in the works, set to debut in 2026. One can only hope that this film will be better than the last but given the unserious disaster that was the last film, I highly doubt that will be the case.
Let's get one thing straight: the artwork in this film was perfect. The animators took what was established by the games and elevated it to a visual spectacle, clearly illustrated in this poster. And every time I look at this poster, I get even more annoyed because what a waste.
I was hesitant to give this movie a try. Growing up, I played the hell out of Super Mario Bros. I played it on my friend's DS, and when my family got a Wii console, I played the New Super Mario Bros Wii (2009) all the way through multiple times. I even played parts of some bootleg versions my dad found online and watched random YouTube playthroughs of the 3d game on Wii U.
When the film came to Netflix last year, I still hesitated. I saw the banner of Bowser singing Peaches and couldn't tell if it was intended to be good or funny, because it was neither. Nevertheless, I gave the movie a shot anyway. And within the first five minutes, I thought wow, maybe they really have done it justice.
The opening scene was peak Mario, with Bowser's takeover of the penguin realm, and followed by the Mario brothers ad, which was superb. Then the glass shattered and it turned out that was as good as it was gonna get.
From that very first scene with Mario and Luigi in the real world, I knew this film had been written with Save the Cat pulled up. If you don't know, Save the Cat is an extremely popular screenwriting handbook that lays out this formulaic screenplay structure to help people without a strong grasp of story to write scripts.
It's one size fits all formula that might help a first time writer with no knowledge of storytelling craft their beginner screenplay and make it all the way to the end of their first ever first draft. But this book and similar methods of writing have trapped many screenwriters in a system they can't ever get away from, one that prioritizes checking off boxes like "state the theme here" rather than organic storytelling.
Such formulaic writing leads to a script like that of this film, which feels less like a cohesive story and more like someone was playing connect the dots between a bunch of action pieces. The character arcs of Mario and Luigi are force fed to the audience: everyone in the real world sees the brothers as complete failures and then through the adventures of Super Mario World, Luigi learns to face his fears and Mario learns to never give up, thereby changing people's opinions of them.
I can't fathom why they would create such tired and unfitting character arcs and then shove them down our throats for like thirty minutes straight until we finally get to the Mushroom Kingdom and actually start the movie. Of course, it's difficult to write characters well when the plot is crafted around selling as many of the Mario games as possible.
The fact that this film directly translated the games into a training obstacle course in the Mushroom Kingdom was beyond ludicrous. I was expecting them to go through pipes and deal with Koopas and maybe even incorporate the powerups somehow, not literally have giant boxes with question marks as if we're watching a YouTuber's playthrough of the game. And artificially injected into the film as a training course, no less.
As disappointing as that was though, it pales in comparison to how I felt when they breezed through a couple iconic worlds from the games in a ten-second montage. By game standards, Mario usually has to go through various worlds to get from the Mushroom Kingdom to Bowser's land, typically in the following order: home world, desert world, ice/penguin world, beach world, jungle world, mountain world, cloud world, and then the lava world which ends with Bowser's castle.
All these worlds are typically conquered by Bowser's armies so Mario's job is to retake these worlds as he heads toward the final boss. Now, I wouldn't expect the film to directly recreate this because at that point you might as well just play the game. But I thought these worlds, the airships, the ghost houses, the Bullet Bills, the underwater and underground areas, and more, all of which are staples of Mario games, would at least take part in the storyline rather than randomly tossed in fanservice elements, if they even made it in to begin with. Instead, they casually walk through a couple worlds and get to Donkey Kong's town.
The Donkey Kong part was what made it really obvious that this whole movie was just a marketing ploy. Rather than a journey across worlds, which is the essence of Super Mario, we have a detour to essentially pay homage to the first game that had Mario. The entire Donkey Kong storyline was so unnecessary like y'all couldn't have saved him for the sequel? And we had DK and Mario talking about how their dads hate them like SHUT UP. We don't care.
Then to make it even worse, a whole Mario Kart sequence?? Why?? Doing a movie based just on the main Super Mario Bros game would've been enough marketing on its own, but they got greedy and had to cram as many of their games in here as possible, which made for a completely unfocused story.
In addition to these terrible plot ideas, the film made four other massive missteps in the story. First, splitting up Mario and Luigi was dumb. No, it's not subverting expectations to have Luigi be the damsel in distress that Mario has to rescue. If they wanted to split them up, at least have them go through different worlds and meet up at the same spot?
I know Mario is the titular character, but Luigi does next to nothing in this film until the last third, maybe. Rescuing his brother isn't the only possible incentive for Mario to go through with this journey, and they could've easily come up with a different reason to get them both on this adventure, such as the pipes back home being blocked or a direct attack on the Mushroom Kingdom by Bowser's armies after they arrive.
Second, the character of Princess Peach was so one dimensional. She's the only human in Mushroom Kingdom, she's their leader, and that's it? She was so unmemorable throughout the entire movie, like why even bring her along if you won't do anything with her character? She was basically just Mario's life coach and the reason for Bowser's insanity. And speaking of...
Third, Bowser's obsession with Peach. In the games, Bowser captures Peach because she's the ruler of Mushroom Kingdom, but the movie leans into the decades-old cliche of having the villain be deeply obsessed with the female lead and desperate to marry her. What was wrong with letting Bowser just want to be in charge without that weird addition to his character?
And last, the final battle is in the real world?? Seriously?? They only did this because of those stupid character arcs they forced on us so that everyone could see the amazing plumbers in action and surprise, they're not failures after all. YAWN. Visually, it looks cool enough but none of it is earned because they didn't actually go through the movie actually fighting these guys.
What really sucks is that they could easily have put in the effort to craft a better story. Mario is a massive IP and it would've pulled the same numbers at the box office regardless, but instead they said, "Hey, let's take the extremely unique world and characters of Mario and use them to make your average generic animation film because this is really just a nostalgia bait game commercial." If you're going to make a film based on an intellectual property and only use that IP as decoration, then why bother? It's just a generic movie with a Mario stamp.
There was even minimal effort outside of the story component. For one thing, using real world music? I nearly jumped out of my seat when I heard the iconic "No Sleep Till Brooklyn," but then I remembered I was watching an animated film, a Mario film no less. There were several instances during the movie of real world songs utilized as soundtrack during the film, including Mario's training montage, and they felt SO out of place.
What made it even worse was that there were also a couple moments where interpolations of the Mario games' score played, and those moments sounded great, but they chose to stick with the weird soundtrack instead. You have an entire existing library of Mario world music at your disposal and you're not using it?? I should be enjoying the desert world level theme while watching Mario ride Yoshi as he eats those cactus guys, not hear "Take On Me" while Mario takes a tour of the Jungle Kingdom. What is even the correlation there between audio and visual?
There was even a scene with Bowser and Kamek where they play a piano duet of the games' underground music theme while talking strategy and I sat there baffled why anyone thought this was a good idea. If you wanted to do fanservice, why not actually give us an underground scene with the underground music playing as part of the score? The logic behind how this film came to be just doesn't compute, like what on earth were they smoking in the development room to have come up with these ideas?
Beyond the music, the voice acting was weird as hell too, and the reason for this is because they actually weren't weird. All the actors can act, of course, but clearly they were directed to sound like generic modern day people. Apart from Bowser, no other voice performance sounded how the character looked.
Toad should have sounded like a toad, more high pitched and childlike, perhaps, not like some regular guy. Peach's voice should've been more high and lofty, really leaning into that princess aspect, rather than just sounding like a regular girl you might know from school. Kamek did have less of a regular voice, but where was that iconic crazy cackle and a voice to match?
(As an aside, his character was also a missed opportunity because his magic allows him to cause serious trouble for Mario in the games, and the way they utilized his Princess Peach disguise was frankly a disgraceful attempt at fanservice.)
The voices for Mario and Luigi were also too regular. I'm not saying they had to have Italian accents, but they at least should've had more specific voices. Mario sounding exactly like the main character from the Lego Movie just felt unnatural (yes, it was the same actor, that's the point), and every time Luigi spoke, all I could hear was "Wild card, bitches!"
This whole movie just feels like such a massive waste of potential. It's not like they didn't have the available talent and creative assets to give audiences the story they deserved. When I look at the visual design in this movie, it just pisses me off even more because look how hard the animation team went, and then look at the script and sound direction.
Undoubtedly, 2026's sequel will make a boatload of money as well. But just because Hollywood can rely on the brand name of popular IPs, it doesn't mean they shouldn't at least put in the effort to tell a story that'll live in the hearts of these fandoms forever.