Miyamoto Says Nintendo Movies Are Still A Possibility
Shigeru Miyamoto, Nintendo’s superstar game designer, spoke with Fortune Magazine in a new article that suggests Nintendo is open to working with Hollywood again, possibly to create a new movie based on one of their properties.
“We’ve had, over the years, a number of people who have come to us and said ‘Why don’t we make a movie together—or we make a movie and you make a game and we’ll release them at the same time?’ Because games and movies seem like similar mediums, people’s natural expectation is we want to take our games and turn them into movies. … I’ve always felt video games, being an interactive medium, and movies, being a passive medium, mean the two are quite different.”
But he also says he’s looking at Nintendo’s role in business more broadly, and entertaining the idea that a movie might help maintain or even boost Mario and company’s place in popular culture.
“As we look more broadly at what is Nintendo’s role as an entertainment company, we’re starting to think more and more about how movies can fit in with that—and we’ll potentially be looking at things like movies in the future.”
There have been signs that Nintendo is becoming more open to licensing, at least. Bowser made an appearance in the opening scene of Wreck-It Ralph (and, consequently, all the trailers), while Donkey Kong was allowed to be used in the maligned Adam Sandler comedy Pixels this summer. On the subject of that movie, director Chris Columbus said the approval only happened after months of negotiations and only after they agreed to represent the game accurately (even though they win in the movie by throwing a hammer at DK’s head).