The Super Mario Bros. Moviehad a sequelannouncedon MAR10, the plumber’s official holiday, with Mario’s dad Shigeru Miyamoto and Illumination CEO Chris Meledandri showing up ina surprise Nintendo Directto say that the movie will be hitting theaters on July 31, 2025.
Aside from that release date and Illumination’s continued involvement, we don’t know much about the next Mario movie. The first film mined a fairly small, focused portion of the source material. When it recreated gameplay, it was in the style of the mainline post-Super Mario 64platformers. There was one diversion into spin-off territory, with theMario Kartbit, but by and large, it drew from the main games with some characters borrowed fromDonkey Kong Country.
That leaves a lot of the Mario world unseen. Aside from that brief post-credits shot of a green-and-white egg, Yoshi didn’t appear in the movie at all, and neither did Waluigi or Wario. There’s plenty of room for expansion as the movie series moves forward, and plenty of games off the beaten path that Illumination can draw from.
The one they really should look at is Paper Mario. Though Illumination has made some of the biggest animated hits of the last decade, the studio just doesn’t have the critical cache that its peers do. At this year’s Oscars for example, the Mario movie failed to get a single nomination despite being the second biggest movie of 2023, passed over in the animation category in favor of winner The Boy and the Heron, as well as Across the Spider-Verse, Robot Dreams, Nimona, and lesser Pixar effort Elemental.
In 2018,Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Versekicked off a revolution in animation with a hybrid approach that tied together 2D and 3D animation styles for the rare comic book movie that actually looked like a comic book, while utilizing the kinetic energy that only the moving image can provide. Since then, several other studios have started to move in a similar direction.Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhemis one of the most obvious examples, but Elemental, Turning Red, Nimona, Puss in Boots: The Last Wish, The Bad Guys, Entergalactic, and The Mitchells vs. The Machines all seem to have used Spider-Verse as a creative springboard, moving away from the clean 3D style that defined the first two decades of animation in the 21st century. They all broadened the palette, drawing on 2D animation, anime, comic books, or both to freshen up the expected aesthetic.
I didn’t list any Illumination movies above because, so far, the studio hasn’t changed up its style. Its recent movies, Minions: The Rise of Gru, The Super Mario Bros. Movie, Migration, and the forthcoming Despicable Me 4 still look like really clean, impeccably produced versions of what it’s been doing since its debut, Despicable Me. Migration’s autumnal trees do have a bit of a watercolor look, but that’s about as adventurous as the studio has gotten.
Mario 2 could be a chance to change that. The whole movie wouldn’t need to borrow Paper Mario’s 2D pop-up book style, but an interlude inside that world could give the studio a chance to experiment with incorporating 2D animation into its style. Illumination is one of the biggest names in animation, but with the rest of the field taking risks, it would be easy to be left behind. A nod to Mario’s crafty spin-off could be just what it needs to inaugurate a bolder new era.
