What do we actually want from a Mario movie?

Now that the first tease for Nintendo's The Super Mario Bros. Movie—and Chris Pratt's Mario voice—is here, we have to ask: What do we actually want it to do?

By William Hughes | October 6, 2022 | 11:02pm

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What do we actually want from a Mario movie?

Screenshot: YouTube

Nintendo unleashed the first trailer for its long-anticipated animated The Super Mario Bros. Movie today—the first time the company’s red-overall’ed plumber/professional problem solver has appeared in theatrical form since the ambitious, bizarre, and financially disastrous live-action Super Mario Bros. movie from 1993.

The reactions to the trailer have been a surprisingly mixed bag, with a lot more positives than we’d honestly been expecting. On the one hand, this is, undeniably, the most beautiful piece of animation that studio Illumination—best known for its Minions movies—has ever produced, with the appearance of Koopa King Bowser’s flying flagship giving off genuine vibes of menace. Jack Black also looks to be having a lot of fun as said bad guy, and the blend of real stakes and goofy comedy feels spot-on. (Cartoon penguins: Cute!)

On the other hand, there’s the whole Chris Pratt of it all; there was probably no voice the Guardians Of The Galaxy star could have busted out in this trailer that would have lived up to all the hype/dread, but hearing “Chris Pratt does a very mild Brooklyn accent” come out of Mario’s mustache was definitely a bit of a let-down.

Which leads us to a question: What, actually, do we want from a Mario movie? On what metrics could this thing genuinely succeed artistically—and not just as a franchise-bolstering cash cow? We’ve jotted down a few thoughts, now that the teaser has given us just enough hope for this thing that we might actually have to live with seeing them dashed all over again.

1. Show off the whole Mushroom Kingdom

One of the nice things about today’s teaser is that it opened, not on the basic-ass grass-and-mushrooms backdrop of the Mushroom Kingdom, but on some distant icy fortress and its penguin defenders. One of the great things about the Mario games is how wide a span of locations they cover, even within a single game. The movie is an obvious chance to show off how huge the Mario world can be, covering everything from whole islands made of chocolate, to the hellish lava worlds of Bowser’s home base, to whole islands made of cake. (Mario … ends up running around on edible landmasses more often than you’d think.) The point is: If you’re going to make a Mario movie look this good, give us all the scenery we can eat.

2. Give us a Peach who isn’t just a damsel in distress

Although it’s struggled with this at times, Mario was one of the first gaming series to offer fans a playable female character, with Princess Toadstool (later re-branded as “Peach”) kicking ass and floating breezily through big chunks of Super Mario Bros. 2 way back in 1988. We don’t get a glimpse of Anya Taylor-Joy’s Peach in the teaser today, but we’re hoping that the version in the movie is the one players will recognize from her more active roles—the go-kart driving maniac/soccer star/general butt-kicker-in-chief—rather than the cake-baking rescue object from Super Mario 64.

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3. No fart jokes, please

Look, it’s not necessarily Illumination’s fault that we associate their output with a lot of dumb, puerile jokes about bodily functions. Since its inception, the studio has been following the Dreamworks playbook to a T, and that includes giving the 6-year-olds in the audience something to giggle at while their parents grove to old Monkees songs. That being said—and at the risk of going off on a tangent about, like, the dignity of Super Mario—we would love it if this movie could take its storytelling seriously enough to not include a joke about Mario or his buddy Toad farting or pooping or peeing on something. Please?We will grant one exception, of course: Wario, if he appears, . It would be folly to ask him not to.

4. No dance numbers, for the love of god, no stupid dance numbers

This one feels like an impossibility, given Pratt’s track record and modern animation’s overall trends and the necessity of soundtrack sales, etc., but we have to at least ask: Can we please skip the bit where all the characters do a big dance number at the end of the movie? We get that it’s fun, and it gets the little kids clapping, and also stops you from having to write an actual ending for your movie. But we’re pretty sure we will die if we have to watch Mario breakdance to “Party Rock Anthem” or whatever. We’ll die, Nintendo. Don’t do this to us.

5. Give Mario a personality that doesn’t completely ruin the movie

This is, ultimately, the big one. It’s the reason Pratt’s casting has made us nervous; it’s the reason making a Mario movie in the first place has always seemed like such a daunting prospect. Because main characters in movies have to have a personality, and Mario … doesn’t?That’s not even a burn! For a video game character like Mario—who exists almost entirely to just be a player avatar to run and jump through all of Nintendo’s beautiful, goofy worlds—any kind of personality would mostly serve as a distraction or a demerit. (Nobody needs to hear Mario yell “Eat feet!” after every third Goomba he stomps into mushroom paste.) But the Mario in the movie can’t work like that: He’s going to have to have a viewpoint, and an arc, and be, well, a person. The trailer suggests we’ll be doing the fish-out-of-water thing of him being a recent transplant to the Mushroom Kingdom, so we’re expecting a fair amount of “guy confused by the weird stuff around him.” But ultimately, this is all going to come down to the writing, and to Pratt: They have to make Mario a compelling character to spend time with, which is literally something that his video games have never had to do. It’s a daunting prospect, and we just don’t get enough of the character in the trailer to suggest how well it’ll be tackled.