Shigeru Miyamoto says the Mario Movie has surpassed his expectations
Nintendo’s chief designer, Shigeru Miyamoto says The Super Mario Bros. Movie has exceeded even his tall expectations, ahead of its Japanese release this week.
Since its broad release globally earlier this month, the Illumination movie has been a huge box office success. According to the latest reports, its third weekend was Universal’s highest ever in the US, and it’swell on course to generate over $1 billion globally.
Speaking to Japanese press ahead of the movie’s debut in Nintendo’s home country, Mario creator Miyamoto discussed its performance and the reception from critics, which he acknowledged had been mixed.
“I did have a level of expectations that this movie would also do well [like the Super Nintendo World theme park], but I was very surprised that it went beyond what I could have imagined when it finally came out,” he said, translated by VGC contributor Robert Sephazon.
“You need some luck to achieve this level of success for a film,” he added. “While many foreign critics have given the movie relatively low ratings, I think that also contributed to the movie’s notoriety and buzz.
“I’d be happy if viewers could say that the definition of what a movie is has changed because of this film. That just shows how lucky we were.”
Earlier in the press junket, Miyamoto revealed that the Japanese version of the Mario Bros. Movie wasn’t a straight translation of the US version. Rather, Nintendo had handled the Japanese script independently.
According to Miyamoto, this was in order to create a more engaging film for Nintendo’s home audience, rather than something that would be “awkward” when compared to the US version created by Illumination.
“Since we were creating this movie in both Japan and the United States, we thought we
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