Nintendo Going Into Movies? Awesome!

By LUDWIG VON KOOPA - It's like... Nintendo is actually listening to us.

For a year and a half now, I've been saying that Nintendo needs to do this movie thing. Sure, they've been doing short little animated films, but a full movie? That requires exponentially more time and effort, much more than what it'd take for the Star Fox Zero — The Battle Begins short.

Imagine a world where Shigeru Miyamoto is so caught up being a movie producer that he'd have no time to ever ruin a Paper Mario game or decide that F-Zero needs a gimmicky control scheme as a condition for its existence. So... in this future, Nintendo will be able to have its designers and lower-level creatives flourish, while we simultaneously get movies utilising Nintendo IP every few years.

Well, friends. This future may be upon us. It's reported that Nintendo is entering the movie-making business. For real. We're told to expect the first movie in two to three years. They're in talks with multiple movie production partners for “full-fledged filmmaking.” (That deserves an exact quote because it's great alliteration.)

You know what also deserves an exact quote?

“‘We want to do as much as we can by ourselves,’ [Nintendo President Tatsumi] Kimishima told The Asahi Shimbun.”

Do you know what that means?

MICRO-MANAGEMENT! And you know who the “Creative Fellow” who would have a role micro-managing this would be?

Shigeru Miyamoto. It's perfect.

Now, people were afraid when they thought there would be a The Legend of Zelda series on Netflix. That never happened, but it made waves on the Internet. People cite things like the Super Mario Bros. movie. Never mind that thing is 23 years old in 10 days. That's older than a lot of the people who complain about these things.

The movie did something right: Its portrayal of King Koopa accurately puts him on Team Fancy.

Everyone agrees that movie was a disaster. This isn't like Paper Mario: Sticker Star where they said they wanted it to be the future of the series, and so it now is. The casting knew the movie was bad while in the process of making it! The first step to being able to change a mistake is to acknowledge the mistake. Nintendo is a lot different now than 1992–1993.

Don't be afraid of Nintendo-based movies. It's not auto-doomed to failure as a concept because of one bad movie 23 years ago. That's silly thinking.

Shigeru Miyamoto, as of 2007, at least recognises there is a structural difference between a movie and a game, and acknowledges that movies have complicated stories. So while he may be anti-story for games, there is hope that he knows that movies have stories and characters.

And if he tries to make a movie without story and characters, at least it'll be insanely avant garde. Probably something based off of Game & Watch. ...Maybe the Game & Watch movie will have an orchestrated rendition of the Octopus theme!


Ludwig is excited for Nintendo to micro-manage major movie manufacturing. It'll be a beautiful thing. What do you think? Let KoopaTV know in the comments below! In the meantime, should KoopaTV commission a movie?


Shigeru Miyamoto is helping design mobile games for Nintendo's mobile initiative. Maybe he'll do that instead.
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Nintendo went and acquired a CG animation studio.