Nintendo and Illumination announce new movie in “the world of Super Mario Bros.”

Nobody explicitly said it's a sequel to The Super Mario Bros. Movie, but it still could be

By Sam Barsanti  |  March 10, 2024 | 4:11pm
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Nintendo and Illumination announce new movie in “the world of Super Mario Bros.”
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Mario creator Shigeru Miyamoto Photo: Amy Sussman

Today is Mario Day, a.k.a. March 10, a.k.a. Mar10 (which looks like “Mario”), meaning it’s the one day of the year when the world comes together to celebrate brotherhood, plumbers, coin collecting, vaguely Italian heritage, and the ceremonial stomping of turtles. When Mario Day carolers go from house to house, saying “Wahoo!” and “Let’s-a go!” in exchange for mushrooms. When we wish for the day we may find our princess, for she remains in another castle. When we all dream of reaching the top of the flagpole and hearing the cacophony of the celebratory fireworks. You know, Mario stuff.

As part of this holy day’s festivities, Nintendo and animation studio Illumination announced that they’re making another movie set in “the world of Super Mario Bros.” Mario’s papa Shigeru Miyamoto and Illumination boss Chris Meledandri shared some details in a special video, like the fact that the team who made last year’s hit Super Mario Bros. Movie is returning for this one—including directors Aaron Horvath and Michael Jelenic—and that it’s set to be released on April 3, 2026 in the U.S., but there were some other notable things that were suspiciously left out… like whether or not this will be a sequel to last year’s movie or just another movie set in the Super Mario world.

Both Illumination’s video and Nintendo’s tweets about the news neglected to use the word “sequel,” simply saying that this is a new film related to Mario, which means it could actually be some kind of spin-off that doesn’t necessarily focus on the Mario brothers, Peach, and Bowser (though, if we’re talking a Mario sequel, the villain should obviously be the evil frog Wart). If we were to throw out a totally baseless prediction, we’d say it could be a Donkey Kong spin-off, or maybe a Yoshi movie to pay off the post-credits scene from the first one? Yoshi can’t normally talk, so that might be weird, but they’re the ones making the movie.

The other (arguably more likely) option is that we’re reading into this too much and it’s just going to be Super Mario Bros. 2, or maybe it’ll effectively be a sequel but they’ll call it Super Mario World or something (as a nod to the introduction of Yoshi and to avoid giving friendless dorks a chance to say “Buh, what’s about Wart? Hur hur hur.”). We’ll probably know at some point before April 3, 2026.

 
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