A Brooklyn plumber named Mario travels through the Mushroom Kingdom with a princess named Peach and an anthropomorphic mushroom named Toad to find Mario's brother, Luigi, and to save the world from a ruthless fire-breathing Koopa named Bowser.
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The directors decided it wasn't enough for Bowser to just tell Peach he loved her, he needed a whole song about it. Jack Black co-wrote and performed 'Peaches' for the film, and the track actually charted on the Billboard Hot 100, giving Black his first solo appearance on the chart after decades in music.
Mario and Luigi's parents in the movie aren't the filmmakers' invention. Nintendo actually sent over unused character sketches for the wider Mario family, and the directors have said the dad's design is basically a one-to-one match for that original artwork, with the mum's design following pretty closely behind.
Years before Illumination got the rights, Sony was quietly trying to build its own Mario movie franchise. Emails leaked in the 2014 Sony hack revealed producer Avi Arad had met with Nintendo, and executive Amy Pascal had even floated Genndy Tartakovsky as a director, though it never got past early talks.
The whole movie arguably exists because of a theme park deal. Shigeru Miyamoto and Illumination founder Chris Meledandri first connected through Nintendo's partnership with Universal Parks on Super Nintendo World, and that relationship is what eventually grew into the pitch for an animated Mario film.
Directors Aaron Horvath and Michael Jelenic were best known beforehand for Teen Titans Go!, a show that took plenty of liberties with its source material and wasn't always loved by comic fans. This time round, they've said they deliberately went the opposite way, aiming for a genuinely faithful, cinematic take on Mario instead.
One outlet actually sat down and counted every single Nintendo reference they could find in the film, landing on a huge 85 separate Easter eggs, which works out to roughly one for every minute of runtime. Safe to say this is a movie built for repeat viewings.
