Nintendo looks into movie adaptations for its games
Everyone should be familiar with the game-producing company Nintendo because of the undeniable popularity of "Donkey Kong" and "Pacman" during arcade days, as well as the 90s hit games "Mario Brothers" and "Pokemon." In this day and age, where movie adaptations of games, or characters of games, are coming out one after the other, it hasn't been the same case for Nintendo as the company continues to refuse film adaptations.
However, according to Screenrant, the Japanese company may be warming up to the idea of film adaptations. Its last movie released as an official adaptation would be the "Super Mario Brothers" in 1993, which, as everyone remembers, has been nothing but a disaster. Since then, Nintendo decided to keep Hollywood away from its beloved iconic game characters. However, recently, moviegoers are seeing some Nintendo characters more often in cameo roles such as in Disney's "Wreck-It-Ralph" and Adam Sandler's "Pixar." One of the reasons why Nintendo might have agreed to be in these movies is because it was able to maintain its characters' animation forms, unlike in the 1993 Mario Bros. movie, which was a live-action one.
Legendary game creator and designer Shigeru Miyamoto recently spoke with Fortune about how the company is now opening its doors a bit more and sharing a willingness to entertain the idea of big screen adaptations. He expresses the reason why he's always felt there should be a line between video games and movies: "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?' 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."
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However, he later adds on the importance of exploring the movie market if one hopes to continuously reach different demographics, as well as adapt to the changes in the entertainment industry. He shares, "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."
