Blizzard could make a WoW movie better than any movie studio. Their cinematics are legendary, which makes you wonder why they farmed out the Warcraft movie.
Blizzard doesn't have the resources to make a full length movie at that quality level. My understanding is that some of their big cinematics sometimes take nearly a full year to produce.
If they committed all of their artists to making a movie they wouldn't be able to produce any cutscenes for their games.
Blizzards storytelling may 'shine' in the videogame space but take it out of that and it's the most one note cliche shit imaginable. Anyone with any intellectual honestly would agree.
You're looking at them through the lens of nostalgia. I can assure if you put them on a cinema screen and removed the Blizzard logos you'd say "what is this cheap looking CGI trash".
Also, there's a world of difference between a one minute cutscene and a full-feature length film.
> Once regarded as a notoriously hard company to work with, it has clearly learned its lessons. Increasingly, it’s partnering with others to boost revenue from its vast catalog of intellectual property, from Pokemon Go maker Niantic Inc., to Nintendo-themed areas at Universal Studios theme parks across the world.
This isn't entirely true though, many are aware of the terrible animated Zelda show in the 90s, and the Super Mario Super Show and original Super Mario Bros. movie.
I think this is probably a similar story to early Ghibli partnerships with western media — their early distributors didn't "get" movies like Princess Mononoke and tried to completely butcher the initial US release. This put Ghibli off of partnerships for a while, but they eventually re-approached and are doing wonderful dubbing work with Disney.
Yes I read that part and I didn’t find that idea to be very compelling.
Nintendo has partnered with a ton of companies in the past. I don't think that partnering with some more proves anything about difficult or ease of working with Nintendo.
Almost. They need to be like Sega with respect to how they treat fans.
Let them make fan art, fan videos without issuing takedown requests or stealing their monetization
Perhaps even grant them license for little silly mods of old games.
Lean into Smash Melee. It has a huge competitive scene. Support this. You can keep modern Smash and legacy competitive Smash alive simultaneously without cannibalizing sales. They could even launch a Melee refresh.
Nobody could ever launch a Melee refresh because even the community today can't agree on what the best version is. 1.01? NTSC? PAL? PAL Yoshi and Fox with other characters NTSC? UCF? Neutral starts? Scientists should take note of our achievements in how finely one can split a hair.
It's actually been explicitly stated from former Nintendo employees that Melee will almost certainly never get a re-release; because:
A. Nintendo doesn't care about the primary audience for Melee. They view the Melee players as being, in many ways, harmful to the brand; which considering the dozens of pedophile and sexual assault allegations, they might have a point.
B. Any change, no matter how slight, would get screams of being "unplayable!" Just one frame of increased or decreased lag because it's different hardware? "Unplayable!" It doesn't work with the actual original 2003 GameCube controller instead of the Switch reproduction? "Unplayable!" It doesn't support the hacks the community has added? "Unplayable!" And on and on... If you literally could never make the community happy because it's not 2003 anymore, what's the point?
> They view the Melee players as being, in many ways, harmful to the brand; which considering the dozens of pedophile and sexual assault allegations, they might have a point.
There were far more of those in Ultimate than Melee…
The latter argument is why they shouldn't be involved. But they should stay uninvolved.
Guarantee Melee is just free of Nintendo IP in the next decade. The community understands its mechanics with fine-grained detail. It's not hard to re-implement but would take taste, care, and a love of the game. Make a fresh engine with a modding platform and cater to Melee players [1] and it'll be A-OK.
[1] Pretty much no modern game is comparable to Melee. It's a strange thing, but if you like Melee, every 2D platformer and fighting game feels worse than it. It's such a highly interactive and dynamic game.
You linked A: a thread of allegations against players of any Smash version, the vast majority of which involve Ultimate or SSB4 players and B: a thread about Nintendo's interview with ZeRo, the former Ultimate #1, who was finally exiled from the community after allegations against him were substantiated by (among others) Leffen, a Melee player, who later received death threats from ZeRo's fanbase. This cannot explain Nintendo's preference for Ultimate vis-a-vis Melee in the slightest.
Nintendo doesn't even acknowledge the speedrunning community, which is a damn shame since their games are some of the most popular. Speedrunners are some of the most devoted fans, which you have to be to spend thousands of hours grinding a single game.
The original Mario speedrun is so optimized that every level except the final one is played perfectly.
For Mario 64 there's a single guy that has the world record in 3 of the 4 major speedrunning categories.
Nintendo could celebrate these incredible achievements by their most devoted fans. There's also a definite interest in this kind of thing, consider the vitality of speedrunning content on YouTube.
This article feels somewhat condescending, but I cannot place my finger on exactly what gives me that impression. I doubt the author intended that and just wanted to have something out to be a part of the "theres a LoZ movie" hypecycle but its a strange route to chart for an SEO fluff article.
Eh? this is way too soon to assume they have learned anything considering how little we know about the movie.
TBH after how successful (and decent) Mario was I woulda argue if they learned anything they would have gone to the same team that made that work.
If anything giving up too much creative control and Nintendo not being hard to work with could also be a problem.
It will never cease to amaze how how a paragraph of information from Nintendo (or anyone) can be turned into a long article likely focused on SEO that doesn't really say anything.
> If anything giving up too much creative control and Nintendo not being hard to work with could also be a problem.
Giving up creative control was what led to the original 1993 Mario film, which certainly made use of that creative freedom but was head-scratchingly bizarre (and a flop).
The source material is that a new york plumber is travelling through a psychedelic fantasy landscape to rescue a princess from a tyrannical dragon turtle.
I love the 1993 mario movie, I think you really summed up why I was so forgiving of the liberties it took. As a kid I had superimposed my imagination on the very limited source material and the movie just did that in a direction I didn't expect.
I have also heard that in its development there were the designs of a much darker cyberpunk world which was ultimately vetoed somewhere up the ladder, that sort of explains some of the weird choices.
indeed, but just wanted to say 'the new movie is also kinda shit' without people putting me into the bucket of misogynists that review bombed the movie.
> It will never cease to amaze how how a paragraph of information from Nintendo (or anyone) can be turned into a long article likely focused on SEO that doesn't really say anything.
That is only going to get more common, until a time (which may never come) that both the general public and search/index algorithms are entirely numb to it. There are a few outlets that keep getting promoted at me by facebook (“suggested for you” links despite the fact I've shown little or no interest in the past, in fact actively hidden previous content) where when I do look at the article it reads like it is either AI generated or is deliberately written to appear like some automated construct put together by an entity that didn't understand, or even hasn't seen, the event/show/what-ever it is reporting on. The volume of that sort of thing has increased significantly (or maybe is just being promoted to me significantly more) in the last year or so.
I'd suspect that a "gister" (as in "give me the gist") website comprised of a ChatGPT/LLM with retrieval-augmentation would be able to destroy this behavior.
1. Some gister app scans your favorite site for new articles
2. Gister sends LLM the news outlets you're interested in
3. LLM gives you the gist without the sensation of all the news.
... Honestly I suspect it'll be so distruptive that it'll probably require all news outlets paywall or die.
I'll never cease being pained that we're in the future where we taught a machine to understand poetry before we had it replace all the deadly jobs of this world.
At some point it will all be done so quickly that a single bit of information could make it to 1000 sites having been expanded, reduced, contextualized, humanized, trimmed, clickbaited, unclickbaited, and written in hundreds of styles....
...all before a single human can read a single word.
I use "The Boring Report" for this. It helped wean me off sensational websites, including hackernews, because I was able to get my "fix" without addictive toxicity. Some of the summaries were hilarious though, like five sentences explaining that an announcement was made, but not the actual announcement.
Global offset table. When you go to the theater to see it, you’ll find a piece of paper on your seat with the address of the real theater written on it. This means you can still buy tickets to your local theater, but Nintendo can show the movie at position-independent theaters, dynamically.
Have you ever played through the Bottom of the Well or Shadow Temple? Its beyond horrific and explicit, also Great Fairy is quite...tittylating. I think Nintendo could find a way to make it work
The mario movie was a stereotypical generic cartoon movie. The true mario movie is Luigi's mansion 3 (a game): that thing is ultra polished with incredible animation and loveable characters, great audio, oozing with charm. I want Nintendo to make it's own movie
Thanks for sharing. Do i need to play the first two? Does it go on sale often? Haven't used my switch since god of war ragnarok came out, and this seems like a good excuse!
It's gone on sale many times. You can see on dekudeals.com. I haven't actually played 3 but I played 2 without having played the first one and it was very enjoyable.
The first 2 are just as good. I love the music in it. When he was just walking around he would hum the music. But it sounded like he was trying to calm himself down. It was a nice touch.
All we can really hope for is that it lives up to the standard of the old Mario Bros movie. If they try to make it half decent, it'll flop spectacularly.
With generic "capeshit" superhero movies no longer being a sure thing (The Marvels is tracking to a $45-55m opening this weekend, guaranteeing it's a huge bomb) and the massive success of Mario, Sonic 1/2, and even the extremely mediocre Five Nights at Freddy's movie, it seems inevitable that video games are the next trendy frontier for movie studios to harvest from.
I do wonder how long it can last as, while I thought the Mario movie wasn't bad as a generic kid's movie, it also relied heavily on nostalgia and references to keep parents entertained. And comic books seem to have a much deeper pool of nostalgic characters to draw from before they start scraping the bottom of the barrel for you-don't-know-who-this-is-unless-you're-a-hardcore-fan characters like Shang-Chi or Ms. Marvel.
For games, after Mario, Link and Sonic, you've got Pikachu/Pokemon, Master Chief, Lara Croft... and then a pretty sharp fall-off after that. Like yeah, I love Metal Gear, but is Solid Snake really a cultural icon the same way Magneto or Mario is?
The mistakes game movies make is they try to make the movie look too much like the game as if it will please gamers. The movie has to be in the spirit of the game but not too literally. Example is that showing Mario jumping and hitting bricks in real life is just stupid. Or street fighter movie emulating a side view fight is just gonna make it tacky. Doom the movie has these dumb ass fps screens.
Hasbro avoided this mistake by basing their movie on Dungeons and Dragons, where anything can happen. I think they actually had the best movie of 2023. Mission Impossible 7 had better stunts, but DnD had a better story, better acting, and superbly-executed comedic timing. I was not a Hugh Grant fan before this movie, but now I am.
Yeah exactly, I was looking for a movie but D and D people got the formula right, it takes creativity to have it be like the game but no look like you are playing one. Imagine if that movie had these dice and little card rules, what’s what a B movie studio would have done
Yeah and that was stupid I thought, and hotline miami was a good game. I hope they have a hotline miami movie but they need to make it like pulp fiction
Great news and it's evident why the stock went up after the announcement.
Nintendo's IP has both great quality and quantity. They have only scratched the surface of what they could do with it with the recent SMB movie.
Remember the story that Nintendo used to be a trading card company? Are they now a video game company as it says on Wikipedia? What is the full name of the NES? Nintendo is an entertainment company. With some well-executed strategy, I can totally see Nintendo becoming a Disney-like behemoth in the not so distant future.
Just imagine something like a Nintendo+ service full with movies and tv shows from their universe. "Hurr durr, but they've done lame stuff in the past ..." Yes ... and? They have all the cash in the world to produce great content and they definitely know how to make fun stuff as well. They can pull it off and I'll glady pay for that!
They seem to be relying heavily on the fact that Avi Arad is involved. Just take a glance at his IMDB, his role as producer seems to have very little bearing on the quality of a movie. Yeah, he worked on Spiderverse. He's also worked on Fantastic Four (2005), Elektra, Hulk, The Amazing Spider Man, Morbius. I picked out the bad ones, but the point his, he's worked on a lot of stuff, plenty of it is trash.
Its kind of what @sickofparadox was getting at above, that it seems condescending.
Reads like: "Obviously its dangerous to make a $1000 million movie by yourself. Teaming up with Sony and Marvel and making generic super-cape movies people are tired of is the correct money choice. Making movies with quirky superhero people like Teen Titans writers is obviously failure."
Its effectively an appeal to authority argument based on popularity.
Unfortunately, its the cursed incentive Hollywood always seems to do. Make high quality product, get endless grief while people try to steal everything not nailed down, and swindle you every way imaginable. Make endless junk copies of junk copies, and play the game to churn out cash, everybody's happy.
71 comments
[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 126 ms ] threadIf they committed all of their artists to making a movie they wouldn't be able to produce any cutscenes for their games.
Also, there's a world of difference between a one minute cutscene and a full-feature length film.
> Once regarded as a notoriously hard company to work with, it has clearly learned its lessons. Increasingly, it’s partnering with others to boost revenue from its vast catalog of intellectual property, from Pokemon Go maker Niantic Inc., to Nintendo-themed areas at Universal Studios theme parks across the world.
This isn't entirely true though, many are aware of the terrible animated Zelda show in the 90s, and the Super Mario Super Show and original Super Mario Bros. movie.
I think this is probably a similar story to early Ghibli partnerships with western media — their early distributors didn't "get" movies like Princess Mononoke and tried to completely butcher the initial US release. This put Ghibli off of partnerships for a while, but they eventually re-approached and are doing wonderful dubbing work with Disney.
Nintendo has partnered with a ton of companies in the past. I don't think that partnering with some more proves anything about difficult or ease of working with Nintendo.
Let them make fan art, fan videos without issuing takedown requests or stealing their monetization
Perhaps even grant them license for little silly mods of old games.
Lean into Smash Melee. It has a huge competitive scene. Support this. You can keep modern Smash and legacy competitive Smash alive simultaneously without cannibalizing sales. They could even launch a Melee refresh.
A. Nintendo doesn't care about the primary audience for Melee. They view the Melee players as being, in many ways, harmful to the brand; which considering the dozens of pedophile and sexual assault allegations, they might have a point.
Before anyone says the above is an exaggeration or unfair: https://www.reddit.com/r/smashbros/comments/hjfv0y/summary_o... and https://www.reddit.com/r/nintendo/comments/hlyrgs/regarding_...
B. Any change, no matter how slight, would get screams of being "unplayable!" Just one frame of increased or decreased lag because it's different hardware? "Unplayable!" It doesn't work with the actual original 2003 GameCube controller instead of the Switch reproduction? "Unplayable!" It doesn't support the hacks the community has added? "Unplayable!" And on and on... If you literally could never make the community happy because it's not 2003 anymore, what's the point?
There were far more of those in Ultimate than Melee…
The latter argument is why they shouldn't be involved. But they should stay uninvolved.
[1] Pretty much no modern game is comparable to Melee. It's a strange thing, but if you like Melee, every 2D platformer and fighting game feels worse than it. It's such a highly interactive and dynamic game.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i13hrynnGNY
The original Mario speedrun is so optimized that every level except the final one is played perfectly.
For Mario 64 there's a single guy that has the world record in 3 of the 4 major speedrunning categories.
Nintendo could celebrate these incredible achievements by their most devoted fans. There's also a definite interest in this kind of thing, consider the vitality of speedrunning content on YouTube.
TBH after how successful (and decent) Mario was I woulda argue if they learned anything they would have gone to the same team that made that work.
If anything giving up too much creative control and Nintendo not being hard to work with could also be a problem.
It will never cease to amaze how how a paragraph of information from Nintendo (or anyone) can be turned into a long article likely focused on SEO that doesn't really say anything.
Giving up creative control was what led to the original 1993 Mario film, which certainly made use of that creative freedom but was head-scratchingly bizarre (and a flop).
I have also heard that in its development there were the designs of a much darker cyberpunk world which was ultimately vetoed somewhere up the ladder, that sort of explains some of the weird choices.
That is only going to get more common, until a time (which may never come) that both the general public and search/index algorithms are entirely numb to it. There are a few outlets that keep getting promoted at me by facebook (“suggested for you” links despite the fact I've shown little or no interest in the past, in fact actively hidden previous content) where when I do look at the article it reads like it is either AI generated or is deliberately written to appear like some automated construct put together by an entity that didn't understand, or even hasn't seen, the event/show/what-ever it is reporting on. The volume of that sort of thing has increased significantly (or maybe is just being promoted to me significantly more) in the last year or so.
...all before a single human can read a single word.
It'll be cartoonish meh with typical Disney plots and dreck writing (It's about believing in yourself! And your friends! You can do it! etc.)
Also, its surprising Nintendo hasnt allowed Mario to be used for Viagra commercials...
I liked watching this movie for the good animation and how the franchise was nicely respected but it have barely anything more.
But also, this guy is being incredibly hyperbolic. It's a really fun game, but this guy just REALLY likes it
I do wonder how long it can last as, while I thought the Mario movie wasn't bad as a generic kid's movie, it also relied heavily on nostalgia and references to keep parents entertained. And comic books seem to have a much deeper pool of nostalgic characters to draw from before they start scraping the bottom of the barrel for you-don't-know-who-this-is-unless-you're-a-hardcore-fan characters like Shang-Chi or Ms. Marvel.
For games, after Mario, Link and Sonic, you've got Pikachu/Pokemon, Master Chief, Lara Croft... and then a pretty sharp fall-off after that. Like yeah, I love Metal Gear, but is Solid Snake really a cultural icon the same way Magneto or Mario is?
It can be done, it just has to be tasteful. In writing anything, never give the audience what they expect. It's lame and boring.
Nintendo's IP has both great quality and quantity. They have only scratched the surface of what they could do with it with the recent SMB movie.
Remember the story that Nintendo used to be a trading card company? Are they now a video game company as it says on Wikipedia? What is the full name of the NES? Nintendo is an entertainment company. With some well-executed strategy, I can totally see Nintendo becoming a Disney-like behemoth in the not so distant future.
Just imagine something like a Nintendo+ service full with movies and tv shows from their universe. "Hurr durr, but they've done lame stuff in the past ..." Yes ... and? They have all the cash in the world to produce great content and they definitely know how to make fun stuff as well. They can pull it off and I'll glady pay for that!
https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0032696/
Reads like: "Obviously its dangerous to make a $1000 million movie by yourself. Teaming up with Sony and Marvel and making generic super-cape movies people are tired of is the correct money choice. Making movies with quirky superhero people like Teen Titans writers is obviously failure."
Its effectively an appeal to authority argument based on popularity.
Unfortunately, its the cursed incentive Hollywood always seems to do. Make high quality product, get endless grief while people try to steal everything not nailed down, and swindle you every way imaginable. Make endless junk copies of junk copies, and play the game to churn out cash, everybody's happy.
Hollywood formula will suck for it.