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The Super Mario Galaxy Movie

When THE SUPER MARIO BROS MOVIE was released in 2023, it defied expectations in every regard. It was juggernaut at the box-office, earning over $1.3 billion worldwide. It provided the right mix of nostalgia and humor and featured jovial animation that was bursting with life. It didn’t hurt that Jack Black was an inspired choice to play Bowser, delivering a cinematic serenade for the ages with his infectious “Peaches.”

It was obvious that it was going to be the first film in what will likely be a never-ending barrage of installments, and on April 1, 2026, THE SUPER MARIO GALAXY MOVIE was released. As this article goes to print, it remains the number one movie in America and has earned over $750 million worldwide. It’s also everything that I feared the original was going to be.

This iteration of MARIO is not for me. Or you. Or anyone over the age of 12, for that matter. Everything that made the first film charming and fun has been replaced by head-scathing nothingness. The bright colors are still there, the characters are still there, but any attempt to tell a cohesive story is not. It’s a scattershot collection of scenes, loosely held together by, well, nothing, really.

Characters new to the movie franchise but recognizable to fans like Yoshi (Donald Glover in full-on Groot mode) and Star Fox (Glenn Powell) are a far cry from Knuckles and Tails. At least in the zany SONIC movies, the new editions were actual characters and not just boxes that needed to be checked for simple fan service. In GALAXY, Yoshi shows up and is immediately best friends of Mario (Chris Pratt) and Luigi (Charlie Day), and Star Fox just happens to be around when Princess Peach (Anya Taylor-Joy) and Toad (Keegan-Michael Kay) need a lift. Meanwhile, Toad doesn’t like Yoshi because, I don’t know, he’s “a cool dinosaur,” and Peaches has a sister named Rosalina (Brie Larson) who, aside from looking suspiciously like Elsa from FROZEN, is supposed to be vital to the film yet has literally no character development whatsoever.

I can’t remember the last animated film that made less of an effort to have any semblance of a story. The movie starts with Rosalina being “princess-napped” by Bower’s kid (Bennie Safdie). Mario and Luigi then ride motorcycles to a village with a plumbing problem, where they meet Yoshi. After that, we see that they are keeping miniature Bowser (the criminally underutilized Black) in a tiny castle so they can monitor him, or something, I guess. Meanwhile, Bowser Jr. wants to save his dad and bring him to the heavily-armed planet he created because of a puppet show Bowser put on back in the day, but pops is kinda cool with Mario and Luigi now. How this was stretched into nearly 90 minutes is still confounding to me. Whereas recent films like ONE BATTLE AFTER ANOTHER and PROJECT HAIL MARY ran for over 150 minutes and felt like 60, THE SUPER MARIO GALAXY MOVIE felt as if it were never going to end.

Though I appreciated a few of the references to the beloved games of my youth, I couldn’t help but feel like I was simply watching a tediously drawn-out and unnecessary advertisement. I found myself thinking I should have just stayed home and watched Mario speedruns on YouTube instead. At least those have suspense and excitement. Maybe things will change the next time around, but when you can consistently rake in a billion bucks, I suppose it doesn’t even matter.