The Super Mario Galaxy Movie

by Cain Noble-Davies

Year:  2026

Director:  Aaron Horvath, Michael Jelenic, Pierre Leduc

Rated:  PG

Release:  1 April 2026

Distributor: Universal

Running time: 96 minutes

Worth: $13.00
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth

Cast:
Chris Pratt, Jack Black, Brie Larson, Benny Safdie, Anya Taylor-Joy, Glen Powell, Keegan-Michael Key, Charlie Day, Donald Glover

Intro:
… both better and worse than its predecessor.

After a series of misjudged or just outright boring features, The Super Mario Bros. Movie didn’t so much pull Illumination Studios out of the red as send them straight into orbit, overriding some lukewarm critical reception (not from us, though; we quite liked it) to become one of the highest-grossing animated films of all time. Da doy, they were going to make another one, but where it gets interesting is with how the sequel manages to be both better and worse than its predecessor.

This is the best-looking film Illumination has ever crafted, bar none. While it follows the first film’s cavalcade of cameos in its references to the source games, the bulk of the aesthetic lives up to the title with a lot of hopping across planets, big spaceship battles, and a scale that cringingly-but-accurately can be described as ‘cosmic’. And everything from the particles of every piece of space and terran debris, to the lighting effects, to the madcap fight scenes (especially the gravity-defying casino brawl), is simply stunning. It doesn’t hurt that the starlike Luma are consistently adorable; Illumination and Nintendo’s toy departments are basically just printing money with these things.

Super Mario Galaxy also sounds considerably better than the first film too. The biggest flaw of Mario Bros. (the nauseating needle drops) are both much sparser and actually well utilised here, while Brian Tyler’s grand retooling of the classic bit tunes brings a little extra shine to the visuals. The voice cast shows real improvements too, both in how comfortable the returning cast are in their roles and how fitting the new voices are in theirs. For as potentially-stunt-cast-y as it sounds to get Childish Gambino as Yoshi or Benny Safdie as Bowser Jr., or even Mr.-I’m-In-Everything-Now-Apparently Glen Powell as Fox McCloud (complete with an awesomely-rendered Arwing), they wholly embody their characters rather than let their star personalities be the focal point, which is always nice to see.

Considering the material, that accomplishment becomes even more noteworthy, because the writing here is a mess. While it admittedly has a decent throughline concerning family connections (and actually does stuff with it, unlike that one film series that immediately comes to mind whenever the word ‘family’ is mentioned), the attempts to allow each character their chance in the spotlight leaves the story feeling directionless, even more so than the set-piece-driven nature of the first film. There is simultaneously too much going on, and yet not nearly enough, as the personality of the voice acting ends up being the only thing about these characters that really makes an impact. Mario and Peach’s will-they-won’t-they? We’ve done this before. Bowser wanting to be a good dad? Wasted. Peach and Rosalina’s sisterhood? More plot device than narrative texture. And don’t even get us started on the ‘movie we wish we were watching’ that is the brief, fantastically-retro backstory for Fox’s involvement here.

The Super Mario Galaxy Movie is a beautiful letdown. It looks and sounds incredible, and shows fruitful improvement over its predecessor in terms of sheer spectacle, but Matthew Fogel’s writing fails to support those upgrades with much beyond “hey look, reference!” It’s still a ways away from the mirror maze of bad ideas that is the pre-Rampage dark age of video game movies, but by that same token, we now live at a time when Sonic The Hedgehog has grown men crying in their seats, and indie flashes like Iron Lung are bringing eldritch suffocation into cinemas. Is this film good? For the most part, sure. But considering its competition, up to and including its own predecessor, we can’t in good faith say that it’s good enough.