“This is bullshit!” a few weeks after starting Chaotic footage of ‘Super Mario Bros.’ actor Dennis Hopper was tough on directors. constant script changes. Released in 1993, the movie was not a faithful adaptation of the popular Nintendo video game, but a frenzied cyberpunk reinterpretation with flesh-and-blood reviewers. The narrative disaster was so great that the two protagonists, Bob Hoskins and John Leguizamo, They got drunk on set to quell their frustration and the first almost killed himself. “It was a damn nightmare,” the first admitted years later. The project sank at the box office, raising only $39 million after costing $48. Its failure was one of the most notorious in recent film history.
thirty years later, Pop culture’s most famous plumber saves himself With just three days on screen according to Deadline everywhere, “Super Mario Bros.: The Movie” surpassed “Frozen 2” to become the highest-grossing animated movie in history, grossing a total of 377.5 million worldwide.
I thought for the fans
This success is a diametrically opposed strategy to the following in the nineties. Mario, Luigi, Peach, Bowser and others are part of a creative universe that has sold 400 million video games and made nearly $22,000 million since its birth in 1985. New movie left development of the narrative faithfully sticking to the wildly popular original material, working closely with game designer Shigeru Miyamoto and the original composer of its music, Koji Kondo.
Therefore, he has chosen to be more than anything. exercise in nostalgia dedicated to delighting his fans. And he did. It has a 96% rating on the reference movie portal Rotten Tomatoes. It doesn’t matter if it’s a scratch pass for criticism. “The movie follows the video game philosophy and full of winks but it also creates its own coherent universe to be able to create new stories,” says Albert Mompel, follower of the legend and Nintendo collector.
From disaster to success
While major video game studios have turned to Hollywood for years to adapt their most famous creations, the success of Super Mario has Alliance between both industries. Nintendo, the world’s most influential video game company, became the first company to bring its intellectual property to the big screen in 1993. However, the fiasco caused by this caused him to take a step back. The strategy has changed. The movie’s box office success, the Japanese giant’s follow the franchise steps astonishment, to expand the narrative universes of Star Wars (both acquired by Disney) or DC Comics (owned by Warner Bros.) into new formats. In fact, there are already speculations about a second, as yet unconfirmed, installment of Mario’s adventures.
Nintendo’s bet is a growing trend in game industry once over the Super heroes start to cause fatigue. A few years ago, filming video games was synonymous with failure. Different versions of ‘Street Fighter’ (1994), ‘Tomb Rider’ (2001-2018), ‘Doom’ (2005), ‘Silent Hill’ (2006), ‘Hitman’ (2007) and ‘Mortal Kombat’ (1995) ) -2021) this is how they prove it. The second wave we are currently experiencing is more mature with solver projects like ‘Pokémon: Detective Pikachu’ (2019), ‘Sonic’ (2020), ‘Uncharted’ (2022) or ‘Sonic 2’ (2022). The last two made it into the top 15 blockbuster movies of the past year.
Few recent successes with the public and critics resonated as much as “The Last of Us.”. This post-apocalyptic video game was a sales phenomenon when it was released ten years ago and has now become a series again. The first season garnered 30.4 million viewers. biggest success HBO from the last season ofgame of Thrones‘. A similar situation applies to ‘Arcane’, a hit animated series based on the League of Legends universe. It won four Emmy Awards along the way, though Riot Games has been pushing it to attract new players.
economic symbiosis
These successive successes, both quantitatively and qualitatively, Greater collaboration between the gaming industry and the audiovisual world. On the one hand, transmedia storytelling allows video game studios to expand and deepen their fictional narratives by adapting them to new formats. In turn, this multiplatform strategy opens the door to diversification of your business. On the other hand, film production companies and streaming platforms, safe bet in financing projects based on video games with millions of users worldwide.
This symbiosis explains why more than 60 video game-based titles are currently in production, including the “Minecraft” and “Metal Gear Solid” movies, or the “Final Fantasy” and “God of War” franchises, the latter for Amazon Prime. . . There is no magic formula for success. A report by analytics firm Newzoo states that video game intellectual property ” transmedia becomes more relevant“It shows that this multiplatform trend will continue to grow. In the coming years, the audio-visual industry can do with video games what it has perfected with comics.