The Super Mario Galaxy Movie

We keep hearing that today’s moviegoers crave high-quality original filmmaking, but the box office numbers paint a different picture. Look at last year’s top fifteen domestic grossers. You’ve got Sinners, the most Oscar-nominated film in history and unquestionable Best Picture runner-up at #8. You’ve got F1: The Movie, which technically counts as an original film, albeit one born out of a lucrative sports industry. Everything else? A sequel, a remake, a Marvel movie, or an adaptation. Many may claim they want risk-taking, unbranded, standalone entertainment. But at the end of the day, more people spend their money on the safe, the familiar, the tried and true.

The Super Mario Galaxy Movie is all three of those things. It is based, of course, on the Nintendo video game franchise which this year celebrates its fortieth anniversary. More specifically, it is a sequel to 2023’s box office runner-up, an Illumination film that grossed $1.3 billion worldwide, just a tad below the cultural phenomenon that was Barbie. If Barbie was a major studio trusting critically acclaimed, commercially unproven filmmakers to do something great with valuable IP, The Super Mario Bros. Movie was a major studio playing it safe and knowing that a polished, colorful, faithful CG treatment of video game characters who have been a part of childhood since the 1980s would pay off spectacularly. And it did.

As on its predecessor, visual appeal is about the extent of my appreciation of Galaxy Movie. This is a movie that looks quite beautiful, which is far from a given considering that Illumination has never strived for state-of-the-art animation, converting productions a fraction of the cost of Pixar, DreamWorks, and Disney movies into hits based on successful marketing and comic gags that win over the general public. Illumination has pretty much never missed the mark commercially, as four Despicable Me movies, pairs of Minions, Sing, and Secret Life of Pets flicks, and a couple of Dr. Seuss adaptations have all hit their box office targets with ease. Creatively, these movies have been far more difficult to celebrate, with the lot of them yielding just a single Oscar nomination for Best Animated Feature in what is one of the Academy’s easiest categories to break into.

Something tells me that Oscar recognition is low on the list of priorities for Galaxy directors Aaron Horvath and Michael Jelenic, both returning from 2023’s hit. Much higher on the list: broad appeal and fan service.

We open with squishy, colorful stars begging Princess Rosalina (voiced by Brie Larson) to tell them their favorite bedtime story, the one about “the plumbers.” But soothing storytime takes a dark turn when Rosalina gets abducted and whisked away. Now, it’s up to those plumbers, our mustachioed heroes Mario (Chris Pratt) and Luigi (Charlie Day) to save the princess and the universe or whatever.

I gather that fans of this series are moved less by the plotting and more by the thrill of seeing things they’ve encountered in the games brought to life like never before in vibrant big screen animation. That is again the thrust of this sequel, which at least deserves credit for not repeating the beats of the original film or trying to create a new viral moment on par with Bowser’s “Peaches” song.

As a kid who grew up Genesis, the specifics of Mario’s universe are mostly lost on me. Then again, the allure of transcribing video game antics to feature film also eludes me, as you could tell from my three tepid Sonic the Hedgehog movie reviews. At the heart of this is moviegoers experiencing something they’ve already experienced in a new way. That was a critical selling point for those versed in comic books at the start of the Marvel Cinematic Universe and it remains a consideration even as that behemothic undertaking endures ups and downs. It’s also part of other big draws, from the Dune movies to a widely-read bestseller like Crazy Rich Asians.

Having an IP that is already well-known and widely loved does most of the leg work on the commercial side. It also seemingly limits what filmmakers like Horvath, Jelenic, and lone credited screenwriter Matthew Fogel can do, because they’ve got to, I guess, remain true to the games and characters. Some of these worlds and personalities have not been rendered like this before, but the visuals are the one domain that Illumination has figured out to satisfaction. There is a wow factor to these colorful images that is usually reserved for first-rate animated filmmaking like Pixar’s 2000s masterpieces and the inexplicably short-lived The Lego Movie.

It is only on this aesthetic front that Galaxy Movie soars in any way. Narratively, it is just fine. It again gets some spirited voice work from Jack Black, whose Bowser starts the movie as a little guy with a high-pitched voice to match. The sequel loses Seth Rogen’s Donkey Kong, but picks up Benny Safdie as Bowser Jr., Donald Glover as Yoshi, and Glen Powell as hotshot pilot Fox McCloud. I’m sure some of these characters and the little nods to the franchise they’re given will elicit knowing laughs and applause at some packed showings, but my mostly kid-free, press-only advance screening gave it all a muted response. It seems clear that video game fans, not film lovers, are the primary audience here.