However, as Nintendo rethinks its strategy, a big screen adaptation featuring the characters that we love from the game company might not be far from becoming a reality. Miyamoto has waded in movie pitches over the years and turned them all down, so it’s fair to say that he knows what kind of movie Nintendo would want to make…and it likely won’t be anything like the abomination that was the Super Mario Bros. movie.
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Nintendo vintage controller at Robot and Makers Milano Show event dedicated to robotics and makers on March 30 2014 in Milan.
The company confirmed that, “For Nintendo IP, a more active approach will be taken in areas outside the videogame business, including visual content production and character merchandising.”
1993 saw the release of the now infamous Super Mario Bros.
Films directly based upon classic video games have a long history of failure. Perhaps Nintendo sees a world where they can raise the bar and improve upon what is out there, providing the first positive video game film experience.
“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.”While adapting Zelda or Mario Kart or Donkey Kong is, realistically, an idea already begging for a Razzie; KEEN would be an understatement”.
Miyamoto’s talk of how video games and films can relate comes across as somewhat ambiguous, and does not necessarily indicate that we may see direct adaptations of popular games at any point in the near future.
As explained by Screen Rant, Nintendo gained prominence when it released the “Donkey Kong” arcade cabinet followed by the early version of the now renowned “Mario”.
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Speaking to Fortune, Miyamoto said that Nintendo has had many people approach it over the years to make a movie together or to get Nintendo to create a tie-in game for a movie. While Miyamoto was “quick to deny” rumors of a Netflix-produced live-action Zelda series, Nintendo is determinedly shifting direction as an entertainment company in order to keep up with changing audience demands.
