“Because I don’t have a lot of experience with the Super Mario Galaxy video game, it actually felt like a more fresh story.”
THE SUPER MARIO GALAXY MOVIE was an animated action-comedy film that was released in 2026, directed by Aaron Horvath and Michael Jelenic, written by Matthew Fogel, and starring Chris Pratt as Mario, Anya Taylor-Joy as Princess Peach, Charlie Day as Luigi, Jack Black as Bowser, Keegan-Michael Key as Toad, Benny Safdie as Bowser Jr., Donald Glover as Yoshi, and Brie Larson as Rosalina. It is ultimately about a cosmic rescue mission that launches when Bowser Jr. kidnaps Princess Rosalina to reclaim his family’s villainous reputation, forcing Mario, Luigi, and Princess Peach to leave the Mushroom Kingdom behind and team up with a friendly dinosaur named Yoshi to brave the wild traps, strange gravity, and uncharted worlds of deep space.
Last week, I covered The Super Mario Bros. Movie, and I mentioned I had yet to see the sequel. So, this is my first time watching it. Once again, I am not a giant Mario enthusiast. I’ve played a lot of the core games on the Super Nintendo, N64, Wii, and even certain games on the Switch. I’m not completely blind to the characters... there are certainly references that I catch, but because I was more of a Sega guy, Mario just wasn’t a character I cared that deeply about.
This film in particular takes a giant page out of the Super Mario Galaxy game, obviously... and out of all of the Mario games I’ve played, that’s one I have very little experience with. It’s one I’ve probably played a couple of times at a friend’s house or something. So, right from the get-go, I had a disadvantage... or advantage, depending on how you look at it.
One of my core complaints with the last film is that the story seemed to come second to the sheer amount of shout-outs, cameos, and Easter eggs in that film. It seemed to me that they squeezed as many Nintendo and Mario properties into one single film as possible and then tried to fit in a story to make it all make sense. The real question I had going into this was... would they do the same thing for the sequel?
I figured that would be the case, and it probably still is, but because I don’t have a lot of experience with the Super Mario Galaxy video game or the characters within it, it actually felt like a more fresh story. Additionally, the movie also introduced Yoshi, who felt decidedly missing the last time around. Even though Luigi was in the last movie, the fact that he and Mario share each scene together in the sequel also feels like a better story decision to me, keeping the narrative more linear and less bouncing back and forth between characters and locations, which watered down that film’s story. It also goes without saying that, just like the last movie, the animation is great. The colors are vibrant, the jokes are silly, and kids are born to love it.
Then again, there are a few things I have to mention. First of all, taking things out into space automatically makes things quite a bit more convoluted. Even though Mario is sticking with Luigi, you have two princesses: Peach and Rosalina, both of whom are in different places out in space. You have two different Bowsers, the regular Jack Black version and Bowser Jr. You even have Star Fox show up in the film, who is probably the biggest example of a Nintendo property showing up in one of these movies that has nothing to do with Mario. But obviously, he’s shared the screen in certain video games like Super Smash Bros.
One thing that I thought was weird in this film was the casting of Donald Glover as Yoshi... what was the point of that? I know I said the same about Chris Pratt in the first film, and that it turned out okay... but I just don’t get the Donald Glover casting. Yoshi still has the typical squeal of Yoshi’s voice... which could be done by so many different voice actors. Why cast someone like Glover in that role?
I think in general, both Super Mario Bros. animated films are comparable. I’ll admit there are things that I prefer from this movie, and things I prefer in the last one. It’s kind of apples and oranges. I actually prefer a lot of the climax of this film over the last, where it has a ton of shoutouts to the Nintendo game that I feel like... we probably should have seen in the last movie, but I digress.
At the end of the day, my end score is actually tied with the last two Mario movies for different reasons. This is the only time I can ever imagine... where I’ve scored three different movies that are from the same property... the exact same end score. This is insane.
Unbiased/Technical Score: 36/50 or 72%
Biased/Entertainment Score: 38/50 or 76%
Total Overall Score: 74/100 or 74% (3.5/5 on Letterboxd)
To quickly rank all three, because my rubric is specific, I do have a ranking, even though they’re all scored the same... because all of the unbiased and biased scores differed slightly. My ranking goes by the biased score first, since that shows which movie I’d rather watch first:
THE SUPER MARIO GALAXY MOVIE
The Super Mario Bros. Movie
Super Mario Bros. (1993)
At the bottom is the 1993 Super Mario Bros. film, which was the live-action movie. Technically, because this has the lowest biased score, it also means it has the highest unbiased score... meaning it is technically the best movie out of all of them. The practical set designs, the costumes, the props, the accidental magic of that film... but it’s not as entertaining as the animated films. Number two I have as The Super Mario Bros. Movie, so the first film in this animated series. And Number one is obviously this film.
Again, they are all tied at 74%, but the biased scores went like this: 34/50 for the live-action, 35/50 for the first animated film, and 38/50 for Super Mario Galaxy. Meanwhile, the unbiased technical scores got worse and worse: the live-action was 40/50, then 39/50, and 36/50. Very interesting breakdown. It means if I rated these movies based on... which one is technically the best, it would be the exact opposite of my ranking. But my ranking is all about entertainment and preferences. So... there ya go.
