Review: The Super Mario Galaxy Movie (2026)

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The Super Mario Galaxy Movie had me feeling how the average comic book fan must feel when watching the latest Marvel Cinematic Universe movie. It was pleasant, smooth, entirely unchallenging, and filled to the brim with references to video game properties that I have liked for decades. It's an IP extension par excellence. It’s effective. It’s distracting. It’s hardly a movie, but that’s the point.

Following in the footsteps of The Super Mario Bros. Movie from 2023 (which I gave a softly positive review on 3 Brothers Filmcast), the new film picks up with Mario (Chris Pratt) and Luigi (Charlie Day) as heroes in the Mushroom Kingdom who are thrust into action when Princess Peach (Anya Taylor-Joy) and Toad (Keegan-Michael Key) embark on an intergalactic quest to aid the mysterious Princess Rosalina (Brie Larson). The plot takes these heroes across various galaxies as they contend with Bowser Jr. (Benny Safdie), the pint-sized offspring of Bowser (Jack Black), who threatens our heroes with his fleet of airships and giant war planet in a bid to make his dad proud.

The plot for The Super Mario Galaxy Movie is unimportant, though. There are hardly any character arcs, aside from a perfunctory exploration of Peach’s mysterious past and her connections to Rosalina (the resolution of that plot will not surprise you). Mario and Luigi get no character development, which is lacking from a story point of view, but almost a relief after the rather forced exploration of their family lives back in New York City in the previous film. Mario and Luigi are more appealing as totems than characters, candy-coloured avatars for adventure through this fantastic world than characters I have any interest in psychologically interrogating. Does anyone really care about the psychological weight Mario carries with him? No, because he’s a silly Italian plumber who takes super-powering mushrooms to fight giant fire-breathing turtles. The creative team behind The Super Mario Galaxy Movie, including returning directors Aaron Horvath and Michael Jelenic, seems to understand this and so they treat the plot as broad, commonplace strokes to allow the viewer into this digital playground.

Almost no attention is paid to character depth or development, since they’re so iconic, and motivations are thrown to the wind. For instance, when Mario and Luigi discover Yoshi hiding near a warp pipe in an early scene, the movie spends no time justifying why Yoshi would suddenly become their companion on their adventures. There’s not a single person alive who would watch this movie and not understand that Yoshi is the green dinosaur that Mario rides in the games, so why bother explaining why he’s a part of Mario’s team? This is even played for laughs when Toad asks it aloud. Yoshi is Yoshi. Mario is Mario. Bowser is the bad guy. Why complicate things with qualities like depth and nuance?

This spare narrative approach, which is amplified after the conventional arcs of the original film, shifts the inevitable focus to the set pieces and the references and the bright colours. Once again animated by Illumination, who are best known for the Minions movies, The Super Mario Galaxy Movie is bright, colourful, and cartoonish. It delights in bright colours and tactile textures for the characters and the world without making them seem realistic in any way. As Mario and company explore different galaxies, we are treated to kaleidoscopic visuals of planets with varying geographic environments, streaming meteor showers, and lots of dazzling powers that Mario and company employ to beat the bad guys. The movie is a bright, shiny object for kids, and they eat it up (if the rapt audience of families from my Saturday matinee is any indication).

The references are even more overwhelming than the visuals. You get an Easter Egg where the Pikmin show up at an intergalactic space port—complete with the visual gag of revealing just how tiny Captain Olimar’s spaceship is. You get an extended casino sequence where the casino floor exists on the multiple planes of a gravity-shifting cube—probably the most entertaining set piece in the film—where the gangster heavies are all the oddball villains of Super Mario Bros. 2, including the delightfully bizarre Birdo. You even get Fox McCloud (Glen Powell), hero of the Star Fox games, showing up through the magic of intergalactic travel, for an extended appearance where he helps get Mario and crew to the final showdown with Bowser Jr.

The Fox appearance is clarifying for the approach of this film—and likely more Nintendo films to come. Fox shows up to the delight of the video game-obsessed viewers. His appearance is accompanied by a short anime sequence in which Fox discusses his past and how he came to show up in Mario’s universe, nodding to a variety of animation style possibilities within the various Nintendo properties (which they will hopefully explore). You get copious references to barrel rolls and even a dramatic barrel roll during a climactic chase sequence—to really hit home that the movie is in on the meme. And, to cap it all off, you get a joke at the expense of Slippy, Fox’s poor, unfortunate comrade from Star Fox, who is always the butt of the joke within the gamer community.

Almost nothing about the Fox McCloud inclusion makes sense in a vacuum. There’s no reason for him to interact with this story in this way except for the fact that his inclusion epitomizes the referential approach of these movies. Despite the name, The Super Mario Galaxy Movie is not really a movie apart from being a 98-minute audio-visual presentation that you have to go to a movie theatre to watch. It’s a franchise extension. It’s a savvy product playing cunningly to young gamers. Most of all, it’s content. It’s entertaining. It goes down smooth. It’s essentially without friction or tension. It’s likely a more enjoyable experience than the first film, but it’s also without any real substance. It’s just endless signifiers, endless property extensions, a grand reference to a gaming world that I have a ton of affection for. It’s fun to be in this world, but at the end of the day, if I want Mario, I can play Super Mario Odyssey. If I want Fox, I can play Star Fox 64. But what’s the point in critiquing the movie as a movie when it’s a movie as content? Looking at the box office—and my own willingness to watch the sequel when it comes out—is proof enough of its success.

5 out of 10

The Super Mario Galaxy Movie (2026, USA/Japan)

Directed by Aaron Horvath and Michael Jelenic; written by Matthew Fogel, based on Mario by Nintendo; starring Chris Pratt, Anya Taylor-Joy, Charlie Day, Jack Black, Keegan-Michael Key, Benny Safdie, Donald Glover, Glen Powell, Brie Larson.

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