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Aaron Horvath and Michael Jelenic also directed the first 'Super Mario Bros Movie,' released 2023.
By Zoe G Phillips
The Super Marios Bros Movie will return with a sequel, Nintendo announced on Sunday. The film, set for release on April 3, 2026, will come almost exactly three years after the release of the original movie.
Nintendo game director Shigeru Miyamoto and Illumination’s Chris Meledandri announced the news during a Mario Day video, celebrated annually on March 10 (or, more aptly, Mar10).
Co-directors Aaron Horvath and Michael Jelenic will return for the sequel, and Meledandri said on Sunday that they and their team of animators are already “busy at work storyboarding scenes and developing set designs for new environments.”
He continued, “We start animation soon, and rest assured we’ll be obsessing over every detail to get it just right.”
The first Super Mario Bros. Movie told the origin story of Mario (Chris Pratt) and his younger brother Luigi (Charlie Day), who began as plumbers in Brooklyn before being whisked away to the Mushroom Kingdom by way of a mysterious pipe. Keegan Michael-Key, Jack Black, Sebastian Maniscalco and Anya Taylor-Joy filled out the rest of the cast.
“This time, we’re thinking about broadening Mario’s world further, and it’ll have a bright and fun story,” Miyamoto said on Sunday.
The first film scored big at the box office, crossing $1 billion less than a month after its release. It broke several records at the time, including becoming the highest-grossing animated film in Universal history at the domestic box office and the third-highest of any Universal movie behind Jurassic World and E.T. The Extraterrestrial, not adjusted for inflation.
Upon its release, The Hollywood Reporter critic Frank Scheck wrote that the film “feels like a labor of love that should easily weather any nitpicking from purists.” Scheck also noted at the time that the movie’s success would prove “sequels and spin-offs virtually guaranteed.”
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