Super Mario Galaxy: The Movie Review — Nintendo Just Changed the Game Again

Why this matters: If you thought The Super Mario Bros. Movie in 2023 was a fluke, a lucky shot that somehow turned a video game into box office gold, think again. Nintendo is back, and this time they went bigger, weirder, and honestly — a lot braver. The Super Mario Galaxy Movie just landed, and it’s the kind of animated film that makes you question why Hollywood has been playing it so safe for so long.

Let’s be real. When Nintendo and Illumination announced a follow-up centered specifically on the Galaxy storyline, a lot of people rolled their eyes. Galaxy is beloved, sure. But it’s also strange. Gravity-bending platforming, cosmic opera vibes, a story about Mario chasing Rosalina through the stars while she narrates her own tragic origin from a picture book — it’s not exactly Fast and Furious territory. The fact that they committed to that weirdness fully? That’s the whole story here.

What the Film Actually Does Well

Directors Aaron Horvath and Michael Jelenic — returning from the first film — clearly did their homework. The visual design is breathtaking. Each galaxy feels like its own miniature universe. The Honeyhive Galaxy sequence alone is worth the price of admission. Watching Mario run upside-down across planetoids while bees the size of school buses swarm overhead hits different on a 70-foot IMAX screen. I’m not exaggerating. My jaw actually dropped.

Rosalina finally gets her moment. In the games, she’s elegant but distant — a cosmic observer more than a participant. Here, she’s a full co-lead. Her backstory, adapted faithfully from the original game’s storybook sequences, is genuinely moving. There’s a scene about 40 minutes in involving a drawing and a goodbye that hit harder than anything I expected from an animated Nintendo film. A few people in my screening audibly cried. I won’t say I didn’t.

Jack Black returns as Bowser, and he is clearly having the time of his life. The musical number — yes, there’s another one — is ridiculous in the best possible way. Think cosmic villain rock opera. Think Queen meets a Koopa wedding band. Think about how much your inner 10-year-old is going to absolutely lose their mind.

Where It Stumbles

Not everything works. The pacing in the second act gets rocky. There are about twenty minutes in the middle where the film is clearly trying to set up lore and worldbuilding for future films — because of course it is — and the momentum slows noticeably. It’s the franchise-building tax, and we all have to pay it now whether we like it or not.

Luigi is also criminally underused. Again. The man deserves his own film at this point. Give Charlie Day the space he needs. I’m tired of asking nicely.

There’s also a subplot involving a tech-forward energy source powering Bowser’s fleet that felt oddly shoehorned — like the writers had been reading too many startup press releases. It didn’t ruin anything, but it felt out of place in a film that otherwise leans hard into magic and heart.

The Bigger Picture

Here’s what nobody is talking about loudly enough: this film proves that video game adaptations are no longer automatically second-tier entertainment. That’s a cultural shift worth paying attention to. For years, the assumption was that games were games and films were films, and mixing them produced something worse than both. That assumption is dead now.

Gaming’s storytelling vocabulary has grown up. The emotions in Galaxy — isolation, love, loss, wonder — aren’t “game feelings.” They’re human feelings. The fact that a film can pull them directly from interactive source material and land them on a general audience speaks to how far the medium has come. Sort of like how raw materials once considered industrial and dull suddenly become precious when the context shifts around them.

🔥 Hot Take: This Is Actually Bad News for Original Cinema

Here’s my controversial read. The Super Mario Galaxy Movie is a brilliant film. It’s also a warning sign. Every time an IP-driven animated spectacle performs this well — and this will perform extremely well — it makes it harder for original stories to get greenlit. Studios look at these numbers and see a formula. They stop betting on new ideas. They start mining their back catalogs instead.

The average moviegoer wins a great film today and loses ten interesting ones tomorrow. That’s the trade. Enjoy the Galaxy. Just know what we’re paying for it.

The Super Mario Galaxy Movie opens nationwide this Friday. Take your kids. Take yourself. Leave your cynicism at the door — but keep your critical eye wide open.