Nintendo Say They Are Going to Start Making Their Own Animated Movies, and Want to Have First One Out in 2-3 Years

Nintendo want to make their own Mario and Zelda movies.

Image via Nintendo

So you might have noticed that there is an Angry Birds movie coming out very soon, and if that makes a ton of money, we can probably expect a load more animated films based on games to follow it.

And if that is the case, Nintendo are already on it. Nintendo President Tatsumi Kimishima recently gave an interview to Japanese newspaper Asahi Shinbun, where he confirmed that the games giant were looking to start making films based on their characters themselves — ie not just licence Mario and Zelda to a Hollywood studio or whatever. 

In the interview, Kimishima said:

We aren't looking to make money simply by directly licensing our characters, but we must invest heavily in new areas such as film production going forward. When we've finalized that sale, we'd like to use part of the proceeds in these areas.

Nintendo appeared to burned off movies after the cataclysmic failure of the 1993 live action Super Mario Bros movie (RIP Bob Hoskins), and while it seems they might have changed their minds a bit, they still don’t want to go anywhere near live action:

We’ve already tried that, so perhaps not this time… That live-action film didn't do particularly well at the box office. From now on we'd like to do things ourselves more than just license something.

Kimishima says they want to do get the first projects out within “five years”. He couldn’t confirm what characters they would be using, but you’d have to imagine that Mario and The Legend of Zelda would be top of their list. Perhaps most excitingly though, he did confirm though that Shigeru Miyamoto, the genius behind Mario, Donkey Kong and about a million other classics, and the most famous game developer of all time, would be involved in their movies.

[via Neogaf and Perfectly Nintendo]

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