We all know what happened in 1993, and we’ve spent the last several decades trying to forget that it happened. The Super Mario Bros. movie was awful, a commercial and critical flop, which led to a short-lived TV show that was just as awful. And yet, Sony Pictures is apparently thinking it might be able to make this work again, and is in the midst of finalising a deal with Nintendo to create yet another Mario film.
The news came about via the leaked email scandal with Sony Pictures, and the emails suggest that the paperwork is done with the exception of a few signatures. On October 23rd, Avi Arad (producer of X-Men, The Amazing Spider-Man, Ghost Rider) sent an email to Sony’s studio chief Amy Pascal to say: “I am the proud father of Mario the animated film.” This email was then forwarded to Sony Pictures’ subsidiary TriStar, to Tom Rothman, with the addendum that “Avi closed Mario brothers.”
On October 24th, Arad emailed Sony Pictures Animation Production President Michelle Raimo Kouyate in thanks for a gift basket she’d sent him full of Mario products. Kouyate’s reply to this was “Let’s build a Mario empire!” The photo of the basket was sent to Pascal who claimed that she “can think of 3-4 movies right out of the gate on this. So huge!”
Evidently, however, the leak has caused negotiations for the film to be ongoing and therefore the paperwork remains unsigned. They negotiations have been ongoing since at least February 2014, when Arad traveled to Japan to “meet with his Nintendo guy (who he has been courting for a couple years)” according to Kouyate.
If this is all true, and if the hack doesn’t have an effect on the negotiations, it would appear that Nintendo has put the memory of 1993 behind them and is ready to leverage its brand in an enormous way in the years ahead. The only question that remains is this: Are our bodies ready?
