What’s next for the Nintendo Cinematic Universe?

12.09.2023 - 17:11 / polygon.com / Chris Pratt / Chris Meledandri / Fox / Nintendo

Nintendo and Illumination’s The Super Mario Bros. Movie is the second-highest-grossing movie of the year, just behind the box-office phenomenon known as Barbie. The logical question to ask of Nintendo’s partnership with the maker of Minions and Despicable Me is: What’s next?

Nintendo fans have daydreamed of a vast Super Smash Bros. universe, where Mario, Link, Kirby, Captain Falcon, and Samus Aran come together, Endgame-style, to defeat… I don’t know, a giant white glove? Giga Bowser? It’s fun to imagine, but how likely is it? Nintendo is a cautious company, and it’s only begun to wade into the media of cinema with The Super Mario Bros. Movie.

For a dispassionate breakdown of what could actually be next from Nintendo and Illumination, I present the following ranked options for the continuation of the burgeoning Nintendo Cinematic Universe.

Anyone still innocently fantasizing about a rapid, full-court press expansion of the NCU with a Legend of Zelda or Metroid movie needs to face the facts: After a $1.3 billion box-office run for The Super Mario Bros. Movie, the logical, profit-maximized choice for Nintendo and Illumination is to make a direct sequel. That very thing was teased at the conclusion of Mario, Luigi, and Peach’s extremely successful movie; seemingly it will focus on a Yoshi running wild in the streets (or sewers) of Brooklyn.

This certainly isn’t the worst possibility! There are plenty of Super Mario characters that deserve the big-screen treatment, like the Koopalings and Bowser Jr. I’d personally love to see Illumination flip the script and make The Super Mario Bros. Movie 2 a rescue movie about the Koopa Kids rescuing Bowser from his Mushroom Kingdom prison — inject some heart into it as the kids reconnect with their absent father. The bolder choice would be to lean into the “2” here and give Wart another shot at being the villain.

Consider the lowly Pikmin, a series personally beloved by Nintendo creative fellow (and BFF of Illumination CEO Chris Meledandri) Shigeru Miyamoto. Pikmin are not only vaguely Minions-like, making them perfect fodder for the kind of physical comedy Illumination trades in, but the narrative setup for the Pikmin franchise is also a solid framework for a kids’ movie.

Like the games, a Pikmin movie could feature a team of space explorers from a planet facing impending doom and searching for a new home. On a potentially hospitable world, they would encounter the subservient Pikmin and fight to survive against larger threats, like Bulborbs. They could even encounter a long-lost explorer — Captain Olimar, perhaps, voiced by Chris Pratt — who has been stranded there for years and is desperate to be rescued, having falsified data about the planet’s sustainability for