Marvel superheroes Iron Man, X-Men, Spider-Man and the Incredible Hulk are Hollywood’s most bankable stars. Avengers: Age of Ultron opened in the UK on Thursday and is on course to break records for its opening weekend box-office receipts.

And now it has been revealed that the man credited with breathing life into the Marvel superheroes franchise has set his sights on bringing a full range of Nintendo gaming characters, including Mario, Zelda and Donkey Kong, to the screen.

Details from the slew of last year’s leaked emails from Sony Pictures show that producer Avi Arad, head of Marvel’s Toy Biz company, has long held hopes of securing the cast of Nintendo’s popular video games, with plans for a film featuring the Super Smash Bros.

Winning team: Robert Downey Jr and Chris Evans in The Avengers: Age of Ultron, a film likely to be Marvel’s third billion-dollar movie. Photograph: Sportsphoto Ltd./Allstar

Internal Sony documents describe Arad’s “five-year chase” for the rights. Fans speculated last week that Arad wanted to make an Avengers-style story, in which the gaming characters team up against a common foe.

Avengers: Age of Ultron, the 11th movie in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, made for an estimated $250m at Shepperton Studios, is predicted to become Marvel’s third billion-dollar movie, helping it to beat the $7.7bn made by the eight Harry Potter films, and thrusting it beyond the reach of Bond, Star Wars or Lord of the Rings. Ticket sales so far are tracking above Marvel’s The Avengers, which opened three years ago and still holds the No 1 spot for its box-office debut.

It has been a dramatic change in fortunes for Marvel, once dominated by its rival DC Comics. Alongside the 11 Marvel films, there are seven TV series, with new films lined up until 2020, each with interrelated plots shaped by Marvel Studios’ remaining producers, led by Kevin Feige, who rescued the stable of avenging cartoon heroes with Arad in the 1990s. It was done by wresting control from the big studios and cannily using rights to minor Marvel characters as leverage.

Sony Pictures emails disclosed in December showed Arad was working on a Super Mario film with the studio, but it now seems he really wanted to create a broader story, using characters from several Nintendo games. Sony Pictures former co-chair, Amy Pascal, was evidently interested. Her emails refer back to meetings held last year between Arad and Nintendo bosses in Japan (when he suggested he was shortly to become “the proud father of Mario the animated film”). Two messages sent to Pascal, who stepped down shortly after the leaked emails appeared on Julian Assange’s WikiLeaks site, confirm Arad’s plan for an animated version of Nintendo’s “fan-service” fighting series.

Stan Lee and Avi Arad at The Hulk film premiere in 2003. Photograph: REX Shutterstock

Using a basketball analogy, one email speaks of a “full-court press” on obtaining rights to the valuable characters, and mentions that Arad had been “planning to meet with his Nintendo guy (who he has been courting for a couple of years) when he goes to Japan”. The other, sent directly to Arad by Pascal, was a link to a news story about the then upcoming Amiibo toy line. Pascal’s enthusiastic reaction to the Amiibo’s launch was prescient. This weekend the toys are sold out at most British retailers, with some shops raising the prices to capitalise.

In a July message sent by Arad to Pascal, ahead of his trip to Japan, he referred to Super Mario’s job, saying: “I am going to try and bring back a little plumber.” He added: “I guess we can all use our pipes cleaned.”

Arad finishes by saying he is also working on rights to Nintendo’s Pokémon. The great appeal for Sony of a deal involving the chief properties of one of its major gaming competitors is easy to imagine.

While Arad is still a creative influence on Marvel films, he has not been an in-house producer since 2008’s Incredible Hulk. Born in Israel to Polish parents, he had a childhood love of comics. Moving to America in 1970, he worked as a truck driver to fund his studies.

He came to Marvel’s rescue, like the comic book heroes he loved, when the company faced bankruptcy in the early 1990s. After a merger with Toy Biz, Arad’s toy company, he was eventually appointed president of Marvel’s film division. His strategy of taking more production control paid off when Fox bought the X-Men rights, Sony took up Spider-Man and New Line made the Blade trilogy.

A boardroom battle for control of Marvel Comics followed, resulting in a Toy Biz takeover and a byzantine deal that included regaining rights to Spider-Man and to several other superheroes that Marvel had previously sold. If Arad now loses out on his chance to bring out Nintendo gaming films, he can at least fall back on plans to bring another comic book star, Popeye, to cinema screens for Sony next year.