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[DKehoe]

The final arbiters of a film are the audience itself, always have and always been. They are the ones film studios make films for because they are the ones paying to see the film, they are the ones that determines if a film is suitable, they are the ones that will determine if a film will one day may become a classic. Not professional critics.

Professional critics have panned films only to turn around one day and declare it a classic when the audience loves a film.

The list of films are very long, spans various genres, and from various filmmakers. Some examples would be Kubrick and Kurosawa where some of their films were critically panned only to have a different reassessment years later when the audience loves their films and puts their films in high regards and not surprising the critics then declared the film where they once gave a bad review as a classic.

Not saying this Mario film will be regarded as a classic one day, but to put so much stock in the opinions of these critics is laughable. When the audience has a movie at 96% and the critics give a film an F grade, maybe its not the audience but the critics that are wrong.

Did critics give it an F grade? The critic score on Rotten Tomatoes is 59%. So it's more just that it got mixed reviews. By definition of how RT works, more critics liked it than didn't. I don't see why the critical response to this has been this big talking point.

 

[NeoIkaruGAF]

I'm going to say something absolutely controversial and that is I preferred the 1993 movie instead. This animated version was such a soulless husk it's incredible, nothing more than shiny dick with no substance. That's not to say the 1993 movie was good mind you, it's absolutely laughable, but it's laughable in that it's so bad it's good kind of way.

Nah, the problem with the 1993 turd is that it's so bad it never even tries to be good.
I'm sure there's Mario porn fanfiction that is probably better than that disaster. If the animated movie is soulless, the 1993 turd is also funless, senseless, directionless - it's less in anything you can think of. Nintendo should have requested the original film to be burned on camera and forced everyone involved with the making of the movie to watch 3 hours of Mario speedruns every day for the rest of their lives.

 

[Tams]

No one said this. Try another rebuttal.

You did through some bizarre restaurant analogy.

 

[Redneckerz]

This movie is like a love letter to anyone who's ever played Mario considering the references.
Yeah it doesn't really do a great job building out its world story wise. That was my primary dissatisfaction with it. But the world is so bright, the references so numeral and its just one happy movie.

Exactly what you expect out of Nintendo.

So i enjoyed it. Visually its amazing though. Lets see UE5 replicate that rendering.

 

[taizuke]

I would think he'd be above this? I understand from a business perspective that he is happy more attention is on the movie due to bad reviews, thus more money, but coming from the creator of Mario just seems weird to me. Why would he be proud of this? At the end of the day, those are still negative reviews, and it comes across as someone who is just happy with the results even if the product is actually bad.

I'm not going to defend critics here as I think some, if not most, can be out of touch, but this is Shigeru Miyamoto we're talking about. He's been at Nintendo for what 45 years now? He's legendary and shouldn't concern himself with this. He could share this sentiment among the people he works with but reveal this publicly? I don't know.

I'll give him the benefit of the doubt and hope something was lost in translation or that the writer chose a clickbaity headline... Otherwise, it's not a good look on him, in my opinion.

 

[Davey Cakes]

The critics weren't necessarily wrong. The movie is quite shallow. However, the goal wasn't really to make anything deep with a bunch of exposition and character development. The goal was to make a Mario movie that could keep the attention of fans and kids, the former with endless references and the latter with ADHD pacing.

I do wish that Nintendo and Illumination would be willing to do something a bit different with the inevitable sequel. Maybe respect the audience's intelligence more. Take some cues from the Pixar classics.