The Ringer-Verse
Is ‘The Super Mario Galaxy Movie’ More Than a Moneymaker? | Button Mash
01 Apr 2026
Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
Chapter 1: What are the hosts' initial thoughts on ‘The Super Mario Galaxy Movie’?
Hi, everyone. It's Amy Poehler, and I'm launching a new podcast called Good Hang. In preparation for that, I asked some of my friends to send in some videos and give me some advice. Just be yourself and the guests will come. Don't be the celebrity that this is their, like, sixth thing they're doing. I love true crime and cooking podcasts. Is there any way you could combine the two?
Well, everyone has an opinion and a podcast. So join me for Good Hang. It's rough out there. We're just trying to lighten it up a little.
Hello and welcome into The Ringerverse, your Nexus feed for all things fandom. It's-a me, Ben Lindberg, Senior Editor at The Ringer and Button Mash host, rejoined today by Charles William Moore, who reviewed the movie for The Verge. What movie is that? Obviously, the Super Mario Galaxy movie.
Chapter 2: How does the sequel compare to its predecessor?
What other movie could it be? And I'm going to begin, I'm going to tee you up, Charles, by reading the first sentence from your bio at The Verge. Charles Pulliamore is a film and TV writer for The Verge, focusing on genre entertainment and how disparate fandom-specific conversations coalesce into what we know as the discourse. Charles, would you care to do some discourse today? Oh, goodness.
What am I not discoursing? I know. Let's have some fandom-specific conversations. Let's do it. How does that sound? So we conversed about Pokemon Pocopia on Button Mesh last month. How's your Pocopia journey proceeding?
Pocopia is good. I feel my relationship to the game is changing, not in terms of my intensity of my fondness for it, but it started off, I was like, we're just going to clean everything up. We're going to restore the town to what it needed to be.
Chapter 3: What adaptations from the ‘Galaxy’ games are present in the movie?
And then I was like, no, everyone needs houses. But then once you unlock all of the pre-made houses, you're like, oh, these are... They were fine, but I should build something. And now I'm kind of in this Marie Kondo-ish sort of space where I spend time with the Pokemon that I'm thinking about building a house for. And I'm like, where would you fit well?
And like, what kind of house would fit well in that kind of area? So all of this is to say is that everything is still a mess, but my feelings about the mess have changed. Yeah.
Well, the thing about Pokopia is that even if you do catch them all, the number of Pokemon who are actually actively present, that number is limited. And so they do go away. And so you do have to focus on the Pokemon you care about. So that really boils it down to the essence of the experience. So your Pokopia journey is evolving, I guess we can say. And today...
I am happy to have you back because I had a great time talking to you about Pocopia and just delighted that you're here to talk about the video game adaptation event of the year, the Super Mario Galaxy movie, which no April Foolin' is out now in theaters.
Chapter 4: How does the critical reaction differ from popular appeal?
You can go see it. And if you're listening to this, I'm guessing you will, as will the rest of the world, because this movie will make a zillion dollars. So we have both seen it. As I mentioned, you have... written, reviewed it, and today we will verbally review it in a way. So we'll talk a little bit about what to expect. We'll steer clear of spoilers early on.
We'll have maybe a more spoiler-specific section of this conversation a little later, and we'll talk about it In a big picture sense, what does it mean for the Nintendo Cinematic Universe? And we'll talk about just the various audiences who might enjoy this movie or enjoy it less and who it's for.
And I think really the consensus so far, the critical consensus has been a little lower than it was on the first movie. And I don't disagree. And reading both of your reviews, I get the sense that you don't disagree either. But I think you're higher on the Mario movies than I am, which is good. We're getting some positivity on the podcast.
Chapter 5: What are Nintendo's cinematic ambitions for the future?
Not that I am a Mario movie hater. I want to make that clear. But the takeaway for me is that if you liked the first Mario movie, you will also like this movie most likely. That is correct. It's the same writer. It's the same directors. It's the same producers.
It's let's not mess with success because when the Super Mario Brothers movie came out, it was the third highest grossing animated movie ever, $1.4 billion. It's one of the most successful streaming movies on record ever. This checked every box for Nintendo.
Why are you guys taking this in a different direction the second time around?
Why not do something completely different after that just stunning success on every level, at least financially, if not creatively? So is that the takeaway for you? More of the same, possibly too much more of the same?
So I think too much more of the same is exactly it, right?
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Chapter 6: How does the movie connect to the Nintendo Cinematic Universe (NCU)?
I get into this in my review, but with both of these movies, right, there is a Herculean task trying to make a Mario movie because to turn, you know, any one Mario game into... into a standalone film would kind of be a tricky proposition, right? The stories in individual games aren't always that strong, especially for the first one, right?
It is the first installment of this new iteration of Mario. You've got to get Mario, Luigi, Peach, you know, Donkey Kong, Bowser. You've got to get them all on the screen at once. And as a part of a succinct cohesive narrative that is going to be presented beautifully and keep kids' attention.
The first film and the second one also, it's picking from a bunch of different pieces of the larger Mario franchise. I think that was definitely the right way to go for the first one. Pick and choose from the canon to build something new that's going to be both a lot of people's first introduction to Mario. Again, I say this all the time, there's new kids born every day.
There's people who don't know Mario, so they have to get all that data. Yeah, right.
It's like the XKCD comic, today's 10,000 things that we take for granted.
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Chapter 7: What cameos and reveals are highlighted in the spoiler section?
Someone is learning that for the first time. Yeah.
And then for older fans, right, that is sort of the more, that's the tricky part of picking from the canon, right? Like, how do you pick things that fans are going to love? And then how do you put them onto the screen in a way that's going to make for a satisfying film going experience? I think the first one was definitely like, it's a me. We're all here. Look at how pretty it is.
And if you like this, we'll do some more and get in the box office. That's exactly what Nintendo and Illumination did. People liked it. People liked it. They liked it a lot. But with the second film, I don't want to say it's a trap that Nintendo walked into, but Mario Galaxy does have a pretty... It's not the most robust story, but it is one of the stronger stories in the franchise. Yeah.
Chapter 8: What are the final thoughts on whether the movie is more than just a moneymaker?
So in going from Super Mario Brothers to Super Mario Galaxy, we're already leapfrogging over a bunch of games from various consoles. But you are asking the audience to follow these characters to a point in their lives where perhaps the structure of the film could have changed a little bit, right? We know the plumbers. We know what their powers are.
We know that, you know, new costumes means cool action sequences. Maybe we'll see more Peach. But here with Galaxy, it's like, all right, so we're getting into Rosalina and Lumas and Bowser Jr. And it's like, okay, all right, all right.
You know, when the studios first confirmed that Galaxy was going to be the title, I think there was a lot of initial excitement because Rosalina is very much one of those, like, fan favorite characters. I feel like part of the reason this is just like my own personal little headcanon.
I feel like part of the reason that Donkey Kong Bonanza exists and the reason that Pauline has been brought back in such a prominent way over the past, not past few games, but between Bonanza and Odyssey. I think it's Odyssey. Yeah. is because Nintendo saw how people responded to Rosalina and just how much she sort of immediately became a beloved character.
Mario franchise doesn't really introduce a lot of humans all that often, right? And so they were like, or humanoids. And I feel like, they're like, you know what? We can also, we can do this with Pauline. She's been here the whole time. We just haven't done anything with her. And those experiments have paid off rather successfully. All of that goodwill that's sort of attached to the Galaxy game
set people's expectations very high for this film. And I think it got everyone into thinking that maybe because the game is so... Because Galaxy is such a different kind of Mario game than the original Mario game, different than Mario World, right? Very different than Sunshine. Perhaps the movie would also... there'd be narrative shifts as well.
But when you sit down to watch it, it's like, oh no, I see the formula. It's the same. It's the same. Here's a little bit of this. Here's a little bit of that. Here's a bunch of new characters from the franchise that we haven't seen before. We've got Warped the frog. Birdo's here. And then they're really kind of swinging for the fences. Like, also the Pikmin are here. And so is Fox McCloud.
And I think that I try not to pay attention to trailers too, too, too, too, too much. But the announcement just a few days before the press screening that Fox McCloud was going to be in the movie. was my first sign of like, hmm, hmm, there's a lot going on here, you guys. Rob the Robot is also there.
And when you do watch the trailers, you do get a sense of like, this is another action and just big set piece kind of movie. Just by a dent of the number of disparate scenes that are in the trailer, you're like, all right, well, the film's going to have to, it's going to have to move and go to a lot of different places. And given the runtime, it means it's all going to happen very quickly.
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