Nintendo is making an animated Mario movie with Illumination (the Minions studio), and they announced the voice cast today. So think in your head who you’d cast, and then check the real cast below.
The cast:
Chris Pratt as Mario
Anya Taylor-Joy as Peach
Charlie Day as Luigi
Jack Black as Bowser
Keegan-Michael Key as Toad
Seth Rogen as Donkey Kong
Fred Armisen as Cranky Kong
Kevin Michael Richardson as Kamek
Sebastian Maniscalco as Spike
Surprise cameos from Charles Martinet
For me, there is only one Super Mario Brothers movie.
I read somewhere that Bob Hoskins wanted to kill his agent for getting him involved in that movie. Which I kinda liked.
There is absolutely nothing good about that first Super Mario Bros. movie. It obviously traumatized Nintendo very badly if it took them this long to allow another movie to be made.
Well, 10-year-old me enjoyed the hell out of it, and even now I can appreciate it for how completely bizarre and detached from the source material it was.
(Also, I believe it’s now canon that the brothers’ full names are “Mario Mario” and “Luigi Mario”.)
When Oscar Isaac was cast as Gomez Addams in an animated Addams Family movie, I thought it interesting and hopeful that they were thinking how he would translate directly into a live action Gomez.
But this casting… not so much.
Hyped for 4 p.m. EST!
Animation is sweet. Jack Black sounds badass as Bowser. Chris Pratt is there too.
for some reason i expected bowser to sound like the dad from the dinosaur series like he has occasionaly in animated series
I dig the animation and the amount of care given to Mario’s world. Honestly, it looks like they are giving more respect to the source material than a lot of actual Mario games have. I’m glad that Mario has jumped over the “it’s gotta be live action with CGI characters” pit that the recent Sonic movies and less-recent Smurfs movies fell into. Jack Black is great as Bowser, though he could stand to be a bit more growly.
Crisp Rat is less than terrible, he’s just utterly unremarkable. As is typical for a non-voice actor he’s bringing nothing to the role. Mario should not have a normal guy voice, he either has an incongruously gruff new york accent or he just sounds like a happy little guy.
As expected, Chris Prat isn’t really even doing a voice. Sigh. I still held out some slight hope that he’d wowed them with something different.
They do get that Mario is popular enough on his own not to need celebrity stunt casting, right? You don’t need to have people hear Chris Pratt to bring people into the theater.
At least Jack Black is taking it seriously, and doing a good job as I expected. Maybe the movie will focus more on all the other actors who can actually do voice acting.
From what I heard Nintendo wants to back away from Mario having an “Italian” accent due to current fears of a weird cultural appropriation backlash, so they got the most average voice actor ever for him.
I wouldn’t say Pratt can’t do voice acting. Maybe they’ll give him a Brooklyn accent, but under normal circumstances, Pratt is just a weird choice for Mario. They nailed the rest of the cast. Keegan-Michael Key seemed lime a good “ironic” choice for toad, but he actually does the scratchy toad voice.
I’m not a big fan of Pratt the person, but Pratt is talented. I guess we’ll have to see how jarring it is.
New Super Mario Movie Direct tomorrow 2:00 P.M. PT
New Trailer Incoming.
It looks great to me!
The comments on that video are weird to me. I don’t get the overwhelmingly positive responses. The same problem with Pratt’s voice acing is still there. I’d get people saying “Yeah, his voice is bad, but the movie looks good otherwise.” I also expected some talk about at least Peach’s voice.
It’s just weird to me that people got so upset about the voice acting before, to the point the video was getting tons of downvotes, and now don’t even mention it.
If it makes you feel any better, I definitely think his Mario voice sucks immensely, and him saying various iconic Mario lines only makes it worse.