The new ‘Super Mario Bros.’ movie was a gamble. It paid off big time

When The Super Mario Bros. Movie opened in theaters worldwide earlier this month to blockbuster ticket sales, the studio behind it let out a big breath of relief.



Illumination Entertainment, which produced the film in collaboration with Nintendo, was taking on a huge risk with a film that, based on history, would not be a success. Turning Nintendo’s long-running Mario video game universe into an animated film has been a project nearly a decade in the making, and one with seemingly low odds of working out. Nintendo’s pre-existing intellectual property, which dates back to an arcade game from 1983, was notoriously turned into a live action film in 1993. It bombed.



During an interview at Fast Company’s 2023 Most Innovative Companies Summit, Chris Meledandri, founder of Illumination Entertainment, told Fast Company senior writer Nicole LaPorte that taking on Nintendo’s IP was a gamble. “Mario’s a film that was entirely made during this COVID-19 madness,” he says. “So, I look back at that time and everything was really hard.”



That gamble turned out to be the right one. The Super Mario Bros. Movie made more than $375 million around the world during its opening weekend in theaters—the top opening of all time for an animated film.



Meledandri is a film producer and former president of animation for 20th Century Fox Films, so he knows how unpredictable a film’s success can be. After founding Illumination Entertainment in 2007, he has shepherded the billion-dollar Despicable Me/Minions animated film franchise, the Sing series, and The Secret Life of Pets series, among others. The Super Mario Bros. Movie cements the studio as one of the biggest forces behind animated entertainment.



Meledandri tells Fast Company that part of the problem with the 1993 Mario film was its total lack of collaboration with the IP’s creator, Nintendo. “They considered that movie to be a license deal. They had absolutely no involvement in the production of the film,” he says. “Following that film there was, understandably, a resistance to adapting their properties.”



When Illumination and Nintendo met back in 2014 to start a conversation about a potential animated film, the approach was much different. Meledandri says collaboration was prioritized. “The foundational decision was to make this film in true partnership with Nintendo,” he says. “I don’t believe anybody’s ever attempted this level of collaboration between a creator and a film studio.”



The two entities worked together through the entire process, from deciding what type of story to tell to designing the look and feel of the action. The collaboration even involved some creative and risky rethinking of characters that have been established for decades.



In the new film, the Princess Peach character is not the damsel in distress she is in the original games. Meledandri says that his studio worked closely with Nintendo to shape how that evolution would be portrayed. “The first shot of Princess Peach in the movie was posed in a manner that we felt was indicative of her much stronger character than people had known from the games,” he says.



Shigeru Miyamoto, a video game director at Nintendo, nudged Illumination in another direction, arguing that the character should first appear as people expected her, only to reveal her new strength as the story unfolded. “So, we went back and reanimated that sequence. And all of us felt that it worked so much better,” Meledandri says.



This level of care is in the DNA of Illumination’s approach to filmmaking, Meledandri says, and it’s part of why the studio has been selective in the types of projects it pursues. Television series, for example, have not yet come out of the studio, despite immensely popular character sets from films like The Minions.



But Meledandri hasn’t shied away from short-form content, with the studio producing hundreds of shorts, either for theatrical release or for its TikTok channel. Working in close collaboration with marketing department at its distribution partner, Universal, Illumination’s short-form content is seen as a tool for seeding audiences for future films. Meledandri says several new projects will be teased through shorts in the coming months.



Developing and testing new ideas is integral to the company, Meledandri says. He doesn’t want Illumination to get complacent in success, and knows firsthand that big bets on films can crash.



“I come from a background where I’ve failed spectacularly financially, with Titan A.E.,” says Meledandri. That film, released in 2000 when Meledandri was at Fox, made back only about half its $75 million budget. “It doesn’t feel good, but you have to be willing to experience it—and for me experience it again—in order to really free ourselves to take advantage of this really unique position that we’re in, so that we can move forward without being hounded by our past success.”



“That’s the tension,” Meledandri says. “The tension is to push at the boundaries.”