Let Nintendo Take Its Time With Movies and TV
I’ve wanted an animated film based on The Legend of Zelda for a very long time. It feels like an easy win for Nintendo, to take one of its many iconic gaming franchises — Super Mario, The Legend of Zelda, Metroid, or Donkey King — and bring them to other mediums. Another Super Mario cartoon, a limited Zelda series, and an older-skewing Metroid show; I’m sure you have a million ideas of your own just from thinking about it for a few seconds.
A recent article published by Barron’s notes the multimedia potential for Nintendo’s franchises. The article cites the success of “The Witcher” on Netflix, as the first of many video game series’ that could make the transition. The argument is largely correct: video games already have a fervent fanbase that overlaps with streaming viewership, making game properties a good place to start pulling adaptations from.
“Nintendo is squandering a content gold mine by largely ignoring TV and film,” says TechCrunch editor at large Josh Constine in the article. “It’s easy to imagine a Zelda film trilogy similar to Lord of The Rings. Metroid could become a [Disney+] Mandalorian-style TV series tracking the bounty hunter Samus as she fights monsters on different planets.”
For any other company, I’d agree, but Nintendo moves at Nintendo Speed. The company is rather conservative within the gaming industry — it tends to innovate in form factor, rather than infrastructure. This is a boon as well as a burden: When other publishers filled their games with microtransactions, Nintendo was one of the few that just gave you a game. On the other hand, when other platform holders had unified online account systems, Nintendo was still messing with friend codes.
Nintendo walks to its own beat, and it’s very old-school Japanese in a way that the more multinational Sony is not. While others pivot quickly, Nintendo commits to its current vision and stays the course until the next thing. And that’s within its own industry, gaming.
Outside of its expertise? Nintendo isn’t making any moves without careful consideration. It’s more concerned about doing it right, rather than doing it quickly. Nintendo isn’t ignorant of the potential of IP expansion. It has a strong business of merchandise, including Amiibo, figures, dolls, and loads of apparel. It knows there’s room for growth.
For a long time though, Nintendo didn’t know where to start. It didn’t know who to talk to. And the last time it let one of its properties trek out to Hollywood, the result of the “Super Mario Bros” movie. That movie was not only a critical failure, is was a commercial flop, making $20.9 million on $48 million budget. Bob Hoskins, who played Mario in the film, has repeatedly called it “the worst thing I ever did”. For a conservative company like Nintendo, the result just made them more skittish.
This started to change in 2015, when Nintendo began expanding its efforts. “For Nintendo IP, a more active approach will be taken in areas outside the video game business, including visual content production and character merchandising,” the company said in an earnings statement that year. Nintendo executive Shigeru Miyamoto reiterated this commitment in an interview with Fortune the same year.
“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.”
“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,” he added.
2015 is when Nintendo also entered into an agreement with Universal Parks & Resorts to create theme parks based on Nintendo IP. That agreement is finally bearing fruit now, with Super Nintendo World planned for a reveal at Universal Studios Japan, just in time for the 2020 Summer Olympics. Further Super Nintendo World installations are planned for Universal Studios Hollywood, Universal Studios Singapore, and Universal Studios Orlando.
Universal Parks & Resorts is the key to Nintendo’s multimedia growth, as the company is a subsidiary of NBCUniversal. (Which itself is owned by Comcast, just in case you forgot.) The deal brought Nintendo in contact with Universal Parks & Resorts sister company, Universal Pictures. In 2018, Nintendo announced that it was working with Universal Pictures on a Super Mario film. Illumination Entertainment, the studio behind “Despicable Me” and “The Secret Life of Pets”, is handling the production of the film which should be released in 2022.
It’s not like the history of video game adaptations is littered with wild success. Only a few get a marginal reception critically and commercially, including “Tomb Raider” and “Pokemon Detective Pikachu”. One of the few unqualified commercial successes is the “Resident Evil” franchise from director Paul W.S. Anderson, who has already turned his eye towards the upcoming “Monster Hunter” film. Most of the rest are outright flops. Not the best company to be in.
Nintendo moves slowly and deliberately. We’ll probably get Zelda and Metroid projects in the future, but Nintendo has to see that Mario does well first. Which means you’ll need to mark time until 2022. Nintendo doesn’t just want to make a host of video game films or shows because “The Witcher” did very well for Netflix. Nintendo wants to take its time and get it right. And we should want that too.
