Satoru Iwata recently announced that Nintendo is considering expanding its franchises into film and “video content.” Certainly this brings to mind recent whispers of a Netflix series based on The Legend of Zelda, but Nintendo’s on to something much, much greater. This is one of the subjects we cover on this week’s episode of Nintendo Week, our Nintendo podcast here at Gamnesia. If you’d like to hear our thoughts, give the discussion video a listen above, or keep reading below.

Marvel has shown in recent years that film can be used to the great advantage of franchises from other media. They adapted several comic worlds into movie franchises, and by building up their cinematic universe with the likes of

Iron Man and Thor, they built up to a huge crossover tie-in (The Avengers), and thereby leveraged dozens of other lesser-known worlds, like Guardians of the Galaxy, to become huge cultural events. Marvel’s enormous success in the cinematic realm is a great model for Nintendo, who can use a similar strategy to great effect and bring their characters back into the wider public consciousness.

It would make sense, of course, to start with massive franchises like

Mario, Zelda, Metroid, and Pokémon, before graduating onto other series. Nintendo would be able to use these big names to their advantage in just the way Marvel did back in 2008: draw people in for the name recognition, and have people stay for the incredible films. Once the core pillars have been established, they could tie the franchises together with a Super Smash Bros. film, much in the way that The Avengers reconvened Marvel’s franchises. Audiences would come for the huge Nintendo universe crossover and leave knowing all kinds of franchises they’d never heard of before: Pikmin, Star Fox, Kid Icarus, Fire Emblem, and dozens of others—priming Nintendo to establish these franchises well beyond their current niche audiences within the gaming community, and instead much larger multimedia brands (and who wouldn’t love a Pixar-made Mother 3 movie, huh?).

The many parallels Nintendo has with Marvel make that model of film franchising an excellent choice for bringing Nintendo’s IP back into the public consciousness greater than ever before. And assuming they make the right choices with filmmaking partners to ensure movies that are actually good, the world could explode with Nintendomania once again.

If you like this video, you can

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