Nintendo increasingly considering movies
Miyamoto says company has been thinking more and more about its role in non-gaming entertainment
It's been more than 20 years since Super Mario Bros. flopped at the box office, and Nintendo may finally be ready to give feature films another shot. According to Fortune, Nintendo executive Shigeru Miyamoto has been working with Shinya Takahashi, GM of the company's software planning and development division, to oversee the use of Nintendo characters in films (like Donkey Kong's appearance in this summer's Adam Sandler movie Pixels, for example).
"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," Miyamoto told the magazine at E3 in June.
After hackers leaked a batch of Sony Pictures executive emails late last year, it became clear there was interest from Hollywood in revisiting Nintendo's properties as well. A series of emails from producer Avi Arad to then-studio chief Amy Pascal revealed that the producer had been talking to Nintendo about making a Mario animated film.
"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,'" Miyamoto told Fortune. "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."