Ben Lindbergh

those characters brawl as opposed to controlling them brawling because these movies do devolve into sort of the third act of the Marvel movie territory where it's just you know people jumping and bashing the other shiny things and you just sort of zone out and your eyes on focus like it's all well done and well choreographed but one battle blends into the next really so it's

You know, the fact that we have Star Fox in a Mario game and we're crossing the streams and it's the Mario multiverse and now there are no limits and any Nintendo character could in theory appear in any other Nintendo property.

And that's intriguing.

But then if the storytelling stays at this level, then how intriguing is that?

really is it other than just, you know, we want to smash our action figures together and see them get smashed together.

I'm with you, but I'd rather play that than watch it.

And to its credit, I don't get the sense that Nintendo is trying to speed run

the franchise building I think that they're just making movies and they're just telling some stories and will that eventually culminate in some kind of crossover event yeah almost certainly if these keep making tons of money but I don't get the sense that it's all in service of that of the almighty dollar

even though it is definitely going to make a lot of dollars.

And it's interesting.

I think, you know, we're all kind of playing general manager, right?

We're just, what's our corporate strategy?

How do we roll this out?

Even as we sort of bemoan that, we all engage in it, that tendency.

You know, I wrote a piece for The Ringer years ago about what a Nintendo Cinematic Universe would look like.

We all like to speculate about this.

And yet, yeah, we don't want it to be so transparent on the screen that that's what you're trying to do, that the movie itself feels like.

Yes, we all have deep-seated attachments to these characters and these properties, but do we have them to the movies themselves?

And I'm sure that there are kids who are forging those connections to these characters and these properties through the movies, and maybe that will be a gateway to the games.

Maybe it won't, right?