The Super Mario Galaxy Movie Screws Up The World’s Simplest Story

By Chris Snellgrove
| Published 1 hour ago

As an ‘80s kid, I’ve been playing Super Mario Bros. and its vast array of spinoffs for my entire life. These games are a core part of my childhood, and I basically grew up alongside Mario. At every new stage of my development, there was yet another Nintendo console and another title featuring everyone’s favorite plucky plumber. I dutifully snagged them all, and these days, it’s only a matter of time before I thrust Switch 2 controllers into visiting friends’ hands so we can duke it out on Mario Kart World.

For all these reasons and more, I was shocked at how cold The Super Mario Galaxy Movie (2026) left me. After all, the movie is full of fan service catering to my generation, and practically every frame is chock-full of Easter eggs for longtime Nintendo fans to appreciate. But a good movie must be more than the sum of its parts, and no amount of cool scenes and colorful new characters can change the fact that The Super Mario Galaxy Movie has a paper-thin story told in the most plodding way. Too mindless for adults and too boring for children, it’s a blockbuster cartoon in search of an audience that doesn’t really exist.

Screwing Up The World’s Simplest Story

When The Super Mario Bros. Movie came out, I found it relatively charming. It was neat to see my favorite childhood video game characters so vividly animated, and they were brought to life by an immensely talented vocal cast. Jack Black did a particularly excellent job as Bowser, and thanks to his gusto performance, that freakin’ peaches song will be stuck in my head until my dying day. The plot was straightforward, but the film leaned into that simplicity by focusing on the driving narrative of the entire franchise: the good guys need to save a damsel in distress.

By comparison, The Super Mario Galaxy Movie makes things way too complicated. On paper, the core plot is mostly the same. A different princess (Rosalina) has been kidnapped by a different villain (Bowser, Jr.), and our heroes have to go kick shell and save the day. Unfortunately, the plot often gets bogged down by mechanical minutiae, including an unnecessarily drawn-out story about the shrunken Bowser getting his groove back and a wildly boring plot about Peach and Toad figuring out where they need to go. That last plot point is particularly offensive because it drags the heretofore breezy story to a grinding halt.

New Characters Can Only Take You So Far

Pacing is, without a doubt, the worst thing about The Super Mario Galaxy Movie. Taken in small bites, the movie has lots of individually entertaining sections. The meet-cute with Yoshi is nice, for example, and the introduction of Star Fox is so fun that I could ignore the most blatant setup for a spinoff ever put on film. Plus, all the action scenes are well-done, and I particularly enjoyed a climactic dungeon crawl that recreated the boss battles of the first Super Mario Bros. It’s an homage so blatant that Bowser, Jr. has a security system featuring pixilated graphics straight out of that classic NES game.

But none of this ever adds up to a cohesive whole. With respect to the animators from Illumination (whose work is truly breathtaking on both an aesthetic and a technical level), most of this movie felt like those empty action scenes that AI bros love to show off on platforms like X. These “prompt engineers” are always so pleased that they created an action scene by typing in stuff like “Hulk fights Doctor Doom,” and they get downvoted to hell by actual film lovers. Those movie gurus all tell the AI bros the same thing: that a good movie has to be more than a cool CGI action scene.

When Action Scenes Just Aren’t Enough

Unfortunately, The Super Mario Galaxy Movie didn’t get that particular memo. The animators and voice cast are giving it their all, but the only really good things about the film are the frenetic action scenes. Collectively, they provide serious spectacle. What Nintendo fan doesn’t want to see Fox McCloud barrel roll through explosions on the big screen, or to finally see Mario drop Bowser into the lava? But there are far fewer action set pieces than you might think, and the only thing connecting them is a shopworn fetch quest plot led by characters who seem almost as bored as those of us in the audience.

Going into The Super Mario Galaxy Movie, I worried that I would be biased in its favor. After all, I’m the lifetime Nintendo fanboy who enjoyed The Super Mario Bros. Movie quite a bit. A sequel that takes everything up a few notches while prominently featuring Star Fox really seemed like the kind of blockbuster popcorn film I’d want to inject straight into my veins. Sadly, I left the theater fighting sleep and contending with a very sobering realization: video games are meant to be played, not watched.

As a platforming adventure franchise, each Mario game can afford to be a badly-plotted action romp because, as players, it’s thrilling to pick up a controller and fight our way through Bowser and his minions. Unfortunately, The Super Mario Galaxy Movie is proof that just watching the action unfold (no matter how beautifully it’s animated) will never be as exciting unless the characters and story are truly compelling. As a lifetime Nintendo nerd, I leave this as the parting words to my favorite character: “Thank you, Mario. But our good movie is in another castle!”

The Super Mario Galaxy Movie SCORE