As a fan of the original Super Mario Bros. movie, I have always wondered why Nintendo stopped making great movies, even critics hated their projects.
In the last few years, people have been pressuring Nintendo to produce a live-action Legend of Zelda series but, Nintendo has side stepped the possibility of a Nintendo TV series or movie like a game of Wii boxing. In fact, there was a rumor that Netflix was going to produce a Legend of Zelda series. It was later denied by Nintendo.
A few weeks later it was announced that Nintendo was looking outside of the video game industry to make money that “for Nintendo IP, a more active approach will be taken in areas outside the video game business, including visual content production and character merchandising.”
This prompted to Fortune magazine to reach out to Nintendo’s creative force and Mario mastermind Shigeru Miyamoto for some more clarity on what this means for the future.
“We’ve had, over the years, a number of people who have come to us and said ‘Why don’t we make a movie together—or we make a movie and you make a game and we’ll release them at the same time?’,” Miyamoto told Fortune at this year’s E3. “Because games and movies seem like similar mediums, people’s natural expectation is we want to take our games and turn them into movies. … I’ve always felt video games, being an interactive medium, and movies, being a passive medium, mean the two are quite different…
“As we look more broadly at what is Nintendo’s role as an entertainment company, we’re starting to think more and more about how movies can fit in with that—and we’ll potentially be looking at things like movies in the future,” said Miyamoto.
It is important to note that Nintendo has the video game industry in the palm of their hands. Several generation of kids have grown up playing Mario, Zelda and Duck Hunt, therefore, if Nintendo decided to become the next Marvel, they can immediately turn one of their video game properties into a feature franchise series. Think about how many Marvel TV shows are coming out in the next five years. Once, the superhero fad is gone, expect Nintendo to take over to start a video game frenzy forcing every major network to dig deep into their pockets for a ticket on the Nintendo bandwagon.
