The Mario Movie Reveals It’s Controversial Trailer

The much anticipated ‘Super Mario Bros.’ movie finally gave fans the first look at what the Mushroom Kingdom will look like on the big screen. Hosted at a Mini Nintendo Direct yesterday, Nintendo CEO Shigeru Miyamoto and Chris Meledandri of Illumination unveiled the world’s first look at the 2023 film. Before the trailer officially dropped, we got some information on how production is developing, and it seems that the final stages of animation are being touched up in time for the release next year. After this, Meledandri said the following about the project:

Its been seven years since we first started talking about making this movie together and it is thrilling to be here to show the very first look at footage with Mario fans

After a short exchange between Chris Pratt and Jack Black, the trailer started to play. We first look at Bowser, Mario, Toad, and (briefly) Luigi- who are all played by an all-star cast. The voice of Bowser was surprisingly fitting- with Twitter user @Redhog_27 expressing the following:

While Jack Black as Bowser and Kegan-Michael Key as Toad were quite well received, some fans were disappointed with Chris Pratt’s Mario. While Mario is known to be the excited Italian plumber (voiced in the games by Charles Martinet), the performance here seems more subdued. Of course, we only saw a couple of lines from the frontman, but that was enough for Twitter to have a somewhat mixed reaction. @BrainDumpTweets and @show0nhead had the following to say:

However, some viewers were much more disappointed in the trailer. With nearly 40 years with the iconic plumber, the voice put forward by Chris Pratt lacks a lot of what many fans associate with the character. @MarkOfTheDragon echoed a lot of people’s thoughts about the delivery shown in the teaser:

Although the casting of Mario has been very divisive, (as it was upon the first reveal earlier this year) there was still a lot of praise for what was shown. Of course, the other voices were given a lot of credit, but the animation especially was applauded. Everything shown looked crisp like all of Illumination’s work and, if one thing is for sure, it’s that this is going to look great on cinema screens.

With a very mixed reveal, it remains to be seen what impact the Mario movie will have in the coming months and upon its release. This can go either the way of being very good or very, very bad. We won’t know until we see the film itself, but its certain that the actual release will take over movie theatres across the world when it drops at some point in 2023.