Earlier this year, it was revealed that Nintendo and Universal Studios were partnering up to bring the world of Nintendo to life at Universal theme parks, a peculiar step for the company that does not often license out their characters, but this showed that perhaps the Koopa Troopa was preparing to stick its head out of its shell.
Ever since the disastrous Super Mario Bros. movie in 1993, feature films have not been in the cards for Nintendo’s characters, but that might be about to change.
“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?’,” Miyamoto tells Fortune. “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.”
Previously there were reports of a live-action “Legend of Zelda” Netflix series in the works, but Nintendo has since denied this. Some Nintendo characters have appeared on the big screen in recent days with Bowser making a cameo in Wreck-It Ralph, plus Donkey Kong, Mario, and the Duck Hunt dog appearing in this year’s Pixels, but none have starred in their own feature just yet.
