1. Last weekend, “The Super Mario Bros. Movie,” an animated-film version of the Nintendo video-game franchise, surpassed a billion dollars in worldwide ticket sales. Its première, on April 5th, was the biggest opening weekend of any animated film ever, beating out the previous record holder, Disney’s “Frozen II.” “Mario Bros.,” which stars Chris Pratt as the voice of Mario and Anya Taylor-Joy as Princess Peach, has also attracted a robust international audience, earning more than five hundred and thirty million dollars abroad.
2. Recycling old intellectual property is a default formula in today’s Hollywood; nostalgia sells. Still, the scale of “Mario Bros.” ’s success has been striking. Although the Nintendo games were introduced in the United States four decades ago, adapting the Mario universe was a largely untested prospect.
3. The only precedent was a bizarre live-action movie from 1993, featuring forcibly evolved dinosaurs and strange reptilian costumes that would be considered far too outré for children’s movies today. It flopped, earning less than the roughly forty-eight million dollars it cost to make.
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4. One challenge, for any Mario adaptation, is that the games have no narrative element to speak of. The only “plot,” such as it were, is Mario’s journey to rescue Princess Peach from a castle; to accomplish this, Mario (joined at times by his brother Luigi) must jump between platforms and travel down pipes, defeating walking mushrooms, vengeful turtles, and, finally, Bowser, the spiky, fire-breathing dinosaur-turtle who kidnapped the princess. Mario himself has no discernible personality.
5. He barely says anything besides “Wahoo!” When he dies, one feels no sympathy or regret; in fact, a player will likely cause Mario to die countless times before beating the game. Surely, the screenwriters of any new movie adaptation would be required to come up with dramatic stakes out of whole cloth.
6. If only it were so. “The Super Mario Bros. Movie” follows the bare outlines of the video games without bothering to fill them in. In fairness, there is a semblance of backstory: Mario and Luigi are struggling self-employed plumbers in Brooklyn. While trying to prove themselves by confronting an enormous urban flood, the brothers get sucked into the video-game world via an underground pipe.
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7. There they encounter Princess Peach, the involuntary ruler of the Mushroom Kingdom, which is inhabited by thousands of mushroom-headed creatures all named Toad. They also meet the evil Bowser, whose unrequited love of Peach has driven him to invade her peaceful kingdom with his skeleton-turtle army. Bowser is voiced by Jack Black, who manages to imbue the character with a desperate charm. (A lovesick piano ballad that Bowser sings, taking advantage of Black’s musical talents, hit the Billboard Hot 100 in mid-April.)
8. The rest of the characters are pixel-flat: Peach is a girlboss; Mario is brave and tireless; Luigi is cowardly. Even the attempts to devise catchy one-liners land with a thud. During one racing-to-escape scene, after Peach pulls a dramatic stunt, Toad shouts at her, “That is how you princess!” Productions meant for children are perfectly capable of possessing emotional heft, even those that draw on desiccated I.P. “The Lego Movie” managed to turn literal building blocks into a moving coming-of-age story.
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