Nintendo Stepping Into The Movie Business

What I love about Nintendo is that they are all prim and proper, they have this methodical approach to everything... and then one day they can have a little too much "tea", walk up to a podium and announce something crazy like... "we're making films now"

And thats what they did... well okay thats not what literally happened, it was an interview with Nintendo President Tatsumi Kimishima with Japanese paper Asahi Shimbun (link is to google translated page).

Apparently trying to do business with Hollywood is such a "process" that Nintendo is cutting out the middle man, Nintendo intends to do as much of the work as possible "in house".  We don't know which character will be getting a film first but we do have some details.

First thanks to a certain live action movie Nintendo is not keen on live action adaptions for their projects preferring instead to focus on 3D and anime/cartoon movies. According to President Kimishima their first movie "wont be out this year, and wont take 5 years"with the company aiming for 2/3 year production cycle.

Kimishima was quick to point out they was "aware of the global market and not just Japan"

This isnt the first time Nintendo has got its movie making feet wet. The company tested all sorts of animation styles for the Smash Bros 4 trailers, Shingru Miyamoto made a series of short pikmin films, and most recently Nintendo release and cell shaded animated short for StarFox Zero.

Nintendo had spent the last year openly saying it was happy to licence its IP catalog (probably the largest one outside of Disney) but wanted to ensure THAT MOVIE and Pixels never happens again.

Abe's Take
Going in house and aiming for strictly animated projects seems like the best bet. The recent Rachet and Clank movie by Sony wasn't bad (for a Sony Studios animated film) and it dose seem poor adaptions are caused by studios wanting to appeal to outside the fan base, case in point the awful song choice in the Assassin's Creed trailer.

Its been a dark time for Nintendo fans like me, With the Wii U seemingly abandoned for 2016 and being at the mercy of rumour mongers and 'insiders' about the NX. Its nice to know that Nintendo is sitting in the headoffice just throwing paper darts around... now excuse me whist I go sit patiently for an 90's style animation of Splatoon