Upcoming movie releases are rarely announced two years in advance. But a Nintendo film based on the Super Mario Bros video game characters is a big enough deal to warrant early notice.
The movie is being developed by the Japanese games company and US animation studio Illumination and will be released on April 3 2026. It follows the breakaway success of last year’s The Super Mario Bros Movie.
Anticipation is all very well. But Nintendo, like the plumbers Mario and Luigi, needs to move a lot faster if it is to develop new revenue streams to complement its cyclical console business. The first Super Mario movie reportedly took a decade’s worth of internal discussions to make a reality.