Watch the First Trailer for the Animated Super Mario Bros. Movie

By Garrett Martin  |  October 6, 2022 | 4:36pm
Video Games News Super Mario Bros.
Watch the First Trailer for the Animated Super Mario Bros. Movie

The first trailer for the upcoming Super Mario Bros. animated movie from Illumination just premiered, and shocker: it looks a lot like really done cut-scenes from a Super Mario game.

As we wrote just a couple of hours ago, the most interesting thing about this first trailer would be hearing how its famous voice cast interprets these decades-old characters. The biggest question—and the point of greatest concern for many fans—was how Chris Pratt would do as Mario himself. Mario hasn’t spoken a ton in his games, but we’ve been hearing his voice for decades, and it’s pretty well-defined by this point as a blatant Italian stereotype. Would Pratt be able to do justice to the hoariest and broadest possible “Italian man” voice, or would he put his own spin on it? Based on what little we hear of Mario in the trailer, we don’t see why anybody would complain too greatly about it—but we also would understand if people are still cautious about the final product.

The only other major characters we hear in the trailer are Bowser, whose ably voice by a booming, gravelly Jack Black, and Toad, whose not always helpful helpfulness is realized with the appropriate chipperness by Keegan-Michael Key. We neither see nor hear Anya Taylor-Joy’s Princess Peach, and although we do get a look at Luigi running from some Dry Bones, all we hear from Charlie Day is a little exasperated cry. They’re going to dole out these “reveals” for weeks to come, we imagine.

If you missed the Nintendo Direct that debuted the trailer, you didn’t really miss much. Shigeru Miyamoto made a few comments, Pratt and Black appeared in awkward Zoom calls to talk about their characters, and Illumination founder and CEO Chris Meledandri is also on hand to talk about their collaboration with Nintendo. It was short and to the point, but it’s even shorter to just head right to the trailer—which you can do below.

Oh, it also seems like the official title will be The Super Mario Bros. Movie. It always felt like a placeholder, but the trailer calls it that, so it might be the final name. Either way the movie opens in theaters in America on April 7, 2023, and in Japan on April 27.

 
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