In celebration of Mario Day 2024, Nintendo and Illumination have announced that a new Super Mario Bros. Movie is officially in development and will be released on April 3, 2026.
While not much was revealed, it was confirmed that The Super Mario Bros. Movie directors Aaron Horvath and Michael Jelenic will be returning for the new movie and that animation on the project will begin soon.
Shigeru Miyamoto did reveal, however, that, "We'll let you know the details once we're ready to share more. This time too, the staff at Illumination and Nintendo are working together. We're thinking about broadening Mario's world further, and it'll have a bright and fun story. We hope you'll look forward to it!"
The news of a new Super Mario Bros. movie is anything but surprising as, of July 2023, 168.1 million people had seen the film worldwide and that it made over $1.349 billion at the global box office. That earned the film the honor of the highest global box office performance of a film based on a video game and the second-highest for an animated film.
In our The Super Mario Bros. Movie review, we said it "is a fireball of animated fantasy. Mario, Luigi, and Peach’s adventure delights with its infectious energy and smart implementations of video game callbacks, and the top-shelf animation renders the Mushroom Kingdom as an Oz-like wonderland that begs to be explored in the inevitable sequels that will follow."
For more, check out our explainer of the ending of The Super Mario Bros. Movie and what it may tease about the new film, our pitches for the next Nintendo movie, and our look at if Nintendo movies can become bigger than Marvel's.
As for Mario Day 2024, check out our roundup of all the big news, including the release dates of the Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door remake and Luigi's Mansion 2 HD and which Mario Game Boy titles are headed to Nintendo Switch Online later this week.
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Adam Bankhurst is a writer for IGN. You can follow him on X/Twitter @AdamBankhurst and on TikTok.
