Nintendo increasingly considering movies
Miyamoto says company has been thinking more and more about its role in non-gaming entertainment
It's been more than 20 years since Super Mario Bros. flopped at the box office, and Nintendo may finally be ready to give feature films another shot. According to Fortune, Nintendo executive Shigeru Miyamoto has been working with Shinya Takahashi, GM of the company's software planning and development division, to oversee the use of Nintendo characters in films (like Donkey Kong's appearance in this summer's Adam Sandler movie Pixels, for example).
"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," Miyamoto told the magazine at E3 in June.
After hackers leaked a batch of Sony Pictures executive emails late last year, it became clear there was interest from Hollywood in revisiting Nintendo's properties as well. A series of emails from producer Avi Arad to then-studio chief Amy Pascal revealed that the producer had been talking to Nintendo about making a Mario animated film.
"We've had, over the years, a number of people who have come to us and said 'Why don't we make a movie together-or we make a movie and you make a game and we'll release them at the same time,'" Miyamoto told Fortune. "Because games and movies seem like similar mediums, people's natural expectation is we want to take our games and turn them into movies. ... I've always felt video games, being an interactive medium, and movies, being a passive medium, mean the two are quite different."
Cars merchandise makes them a fortune
Nintendo, stop making hardware, make games for everyone, crank that multimedia and stuff your pockets.
Film/Television/Music already exist under the banner of the big five media companies, video games is the one medium (excl. Sony) that is still largely independent. I have no doubt that one day Nintendo and Square will fold under the Disney banner, EA and Ubisoft under the Warner Brothers banner, ActivisionBlizz under GE etc etc. It would be nice to have a few more decades where video game companies can try their own thing and not just become another generic American media holding company. Once the old vanguard pass this will probably be inevitable, I'm not sure why we want to rush them to mediocrity.
Edited 3 times. Last edit by Shane Sweeney on 25th August 2015 1:58am
Yes please (true to brand though) no messing with characters or storylines or lands or anything, TRUE to the brand.
Edited 2 times. Last edit by Peter Caddock on 25th August 2015 4:38pm
They float on a bubble of Nostalgia and are in a slow moving death spiral caused by being stuck in 1992. It's not a question of whether Nintendo will abandon hardware, it's a question of whether they do it before they're Sega and can no longer financially support it. Sure, that might be 2030, but it's going to happen.
Nintendo, for the moment still has the power to form relationships they control. People under twenty, by and large have no lasting relationship with the Nintendo brand or its franchises. They have a DS because it's what their parents will buy them and it has Pokemon. Mario, Zelda, metroid, etc, they have no real nostalgia for.
Nintendo goes third party, concentrates on the collectors, and establishing new, or revitalizing old franchises in molds the kids can and will latch onto. That is the only thing that stands a chance of long term independent viability.
It's quite telling that every Mario appearance on TV or at the cinema has ignored so much of the source material, and mostly relies on new things the producers have came up with themselves. Despite consciously breaking canon, they still could not produce anything of value. With the movie, I can appreciate live action Mario is hard to do (but why do it then...), but the only thing that remotely looks like anything in Mario games is the uniforms Mario and Luigi wear. Even the cartoons couldn't resist adding in stupid things like completely new environments and characters.
Games series like Zelda or Metroid could possibly work as they have stronger narratives, but Nintendo would definitely have to be careful about who was tasked with the work. I swear if I hear another "excuuuuuse me Princess"...