The Super Mario Galaxy Movie (2026)
Took my daughter and her friend and I honestly didn’t have the highest expectations, and while I mostly right in my assumption of the inevitable detriments of these sort of reference heavy franchise movies, it did still impress me in a small way. It does still have what I would call the checklist problem, where it is obvious that many scenes mostly exist to show off a well known game mechanic, special ability or reference old games. A couple of times it does weave into the narrative in a sort of natural way, but mostly not. I do however need to acknowledge the great sound work, as the nostalgia for the Mario games rely heavily on recognizable sounds, the film does integrate those in a nice heavy. And Yoshi really is cute. It still seems mostly like a barely connected string of scenes, and less like a cohesive complete film. To its credit, it is a lot better than the Minecraft movie in that regard. Where it succeeds, is that is properly a game-movie, not merely a movie based on a game franchise. I admit this is the hard thing for me to accept and engage with, because it sets normal film narrative conventions to the side and replace them with game logic. It may be fairer to judge this movie by its rich world building, its blend of well known game mechanics and references, and a narrative that is built like the story mode in a game and not like a movie script. It is not for me, but this is a proper game-movie and it does it better than most previous attempts at game adaptions.
Rating: 3