Nintendo Is Thinking About Getting Into The Movie Business Again
Ever since the wonderfully disastrous 1993 film Super Mario Bros. bombed at the box office, Nintendo has not licensed any of their characters for feature film adaptations. That’s how bad they hated that movie! There were rumors of a Legend of Zelda Netflix series in development, but Nintendo has denied this is happening.
Earlier this year, Nintendo partnered up with Universal Studios to bring the Nintendo universe to life at the Universal theme parks. This was an interesting and big step for Nintendo because they don’t license out their characters to anyone. It also may have been the first step in actually seeing Nintendo get into the movie business again.
Over the years, we have seen a few characters from the Nintendo universe appear on the big screen like Bowser in Wreck-It Ralph and Donkey Kong, Mario, and the Duck Hunt dog appearing in this year’s Pixels, but none of them have had their own feature film adaptation.
During a recent interview with Fortune, Nintendo general manager Shigeru Miyamoto said:
“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?’ 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.”
If Nintendo does start making movies based on their characters again, which ones would you like to see grace the big screen most? I think they’d be stupid not to do anything with Zelda. That needs to happen!