For roughly 40 years Nintendo held a sacred internal rule: characters from different game series do not coexist within the same work. Then Shigeru Miyamoto went around lobbying his colleagues to break it, so that Fox McCloud could appear in The Super Mario Galaxy Movie. A new Japanese interview lays out the behind-the-scenes story, including how Hollywood actors are now cold-calling Illumination asking to voice Nintendo characters, and why the Japanese-language version of the film was rewritten from scratch rather than localized.

Nintendo's 40-year rule: no IP mixing

On May 2, the Japanese entertainment site Crank-in! published a joint interview with Nintendo Representative Director and Fellow Shigeru Miyamoto and Illumination CEO Chris Meledandri. It clustered around three themes: the rewriting of a long-standing Nintendo rule, A-list actors cold-pitching themselves for Nintendo voice roles, and a separate Japanese script written from scratch rather than localized.

Nintendo holds an unusually large catalog of valuable in-house IPs: Mario, Zelda, Star Fox, Metroid, Animal Crossing, Pikmin, Donkey Kong, Kirby. With rare exceptions, those worlds are kept strictly separate. The long-standing exception is the Super Smash Bros. fighting series, which Miyamoto has explained away by framing it as a toy box where the characters are dolls rather than a shared universe.

In the Crank-in! interview, Miyamoto explained that during early discussions about giving the sequel a "Mario-flavored Galaxy" feel, Illumination came back with a proposal: what if Fox McCloud showed up? Miyamoto found the idea interesting, but it directly violated Nintendo's internal rule. So before saying yes externally, he started what he jokingly called "lobbying activity" inside Nintendo, asking the people who had upheld the rule for years whether they'd let him bend it just this once.

In other words, the crossover fans have been imagining through decades of Smash Bros. speculation was unlocked because the company's most influential designer walked the halls in Kyoto and talked his colleagues into it.

For context: Super Smash Bros., first released for Nintendo 64 in 1999, brings together not just Nintendo characters but Sonic, Snake, Cloud, Steve from Minecraft and dozens more. The latest entry, Super Smash Bros. Ultimate (2018), has sold over 36 million copies. The loophole Miyamoto has always cited, that those characters are dolls in a toy box rather than narratively coexisting, is exactly what the Galaxy Movie punched through.

A separate interview hints at the next move: Pikmin as the official exception

This wasn't in the Crank-in! piece, but in a parallel interview with the Japanese gaming site Dengeki Online, Miyamoto went further. Going forward, he said, Pikmin will be designated Nintendo's rule-breaker character, explicitly allowed to mix with any other IP. The Galaxy Movie didn't just bend the rule once for Fox; it appears to have triggered a structural shift in how Nintendo thinks about cross-IP character use, at least on film.

The implication is significant. Fans and industry watchers had already started using the term "Illumination–Nintendo Cinematic Universe" after Fox McCloud's reveal, and now there's at least a soft signal that future films could include cameos and crossovers more freely. Whether this leads to a Donkey Kong spin-off, a Star Fox standalone, or eventual ties to the announced live-action Zelda film remains to be seen.

Not all longtime Nintendo fans are thrilled. Some have pushed back on the framing entirely, pointing out that Metroid, F-Zero and Star Fox have long shared an implicit science-fiction universe, and questioning whether the rule was ever as airtight as Miyamoto suggests.

"Please let me play Fox", Hollywood stars cold-calling Illumination

The other major reveal: Glen Powell didn't just accept the role of Fox McCloud, he campaigned for it before the role existed. During promotion of the first Mario movie, Meledandri says, he received a phone call from Powell himself, who wanted him to understand how deeply he loved Fox McCloud and how much he hoped to be part of a Star Fox film someday.

At that point there was no plan to put Fox in the sequel. When the casting decision came around later, Meledandri remembered the call and rang Powell back.

According to Meledandri, unsolicited approaches from actors are unusual for Illumination. Normally the studio places the calls. But for Nintendo projects, actors keep reaching out themselves. Miyamoto called this "really lucky" and said it feels new to have a film team where the animators, cast and directors are all genuinely Mario fans.

Brie Larson and Donald Glover also pitched themselves

This isn't just a Powell story. The interview confirmed that Brie Larson (Princess Rosalina, also Captain Marvel) reached out to Meledandri because she's a longtime Nintendo fan and wanted to be involved.

The Donald Glover anecdote is more striking still. Glover saw the first Mario movie and called Meledandri afterward to say, in essence, that he needed to be involved in a Nintendo movie any way they would have him, and that he would deliver the most incredible Yoshi. The casting was effectively reverse-engineered from his enthusiasm. He has since said publicly that he felt timid taking the role, and decided to "study really hard" rather than over-promise.

Context matters here. The Super Mario Bros. Movie (2023) grossed $1.36 billion worldwide on a $100 million budget. That kind of return puts Nintendo film projects in roughly the cultural and economic territory of peak-era Pixar or Marvel.

There is a generational dynamic at play too. Many American actors in their 30s through 50s today were Nintendo Entertainment System or Super Nintendo kids. Jack Black's commitment to Bowser in the first film and Glover's approach for Yoshi look less like commercial calculation and more like fan participation.

The Japanese version isn't a localization, it's a rewrite

One of the more unusual production decisions in the interview involves the Japanese-language script. In most Hollywood blockbusters, non-English versions are localizations: the English script is translated and culturally adjusted, but the structure and dialogue beats follow the original closely. Miyamoto explicitly says that's not what happened with the Galaxy Movie's Japanese version.

For this film, the team took the finalized English script and rewrote the whole thing in Japanese, not as a translation but as a parallel original. The Japanese script was written by Makoto Ueda, head of the Kyoto theater company Europa Kikaku. Miyamoto, who has known Ueda for years, wanted the Mario characters to speak with the conversational rhythm of Ueda's stage plays. Direct localization, he said, breaks comedic timing: Japanese and Western humor do not align beat for beat, and forcing one onto the other produces stilted dialogue.

On top of that, the Japanese voice cast was given an unusual instruction: improvise. The standard rule in Japanese dub work is "do not change the source text," but for this film, Mamoru Miyano (Mario) and the other Japanese voice actors were told that ad-libs were not just permitted but encouraged. The result is a Japanese version with its own distinct comedic texture, separate from the English one.

Europa Kikaku, founded in Kyoto in 1998, is one of Japan's better-known small theater companies; Ueda's stage play Summer Time Machine Blues was adapted into a feature film in 2005. Nintendo's headquarters is also in Kyoto, which makes Miyamoto and Ueda neighbors in both the geographic and the cultural sense.

"Princess Peach isn't just a princess anymore", rethinking the heroines

Miyamoto is unusually frank about the historical depiction of Nintendo heroines. He goes back to Donkey Kong (1981): the girl got carried up, so the game is about going up. The kidnapped princess functioned as a navigational arrow more than a character. He acknowledges directly that this no longer matches contemporary expectations, but argues that in games it is hard to change, because the gameplay structure depends on it.

Films are different. There, he says, you can change everything. The first Mario movie reimagined Peach as a fighter; the sequel takes a different angle, exploring subtle emotional friction between Mario and Peach plus the inner strength of Rosalina. Meledandri added that at Los Angeles test screenings, female audiences responded positively to both portrayals.

The redirection isn't universally popular. Some longtime fans have called the Peach and Rosalina portrayals a blatant retcon of the games, particularly players attached to how the characters appeared in Super Mario Galaxy (2007).

"Children are adults who just know less", and the no-toilet-humor rule

One of the most quietly distinctive parts of Miyamoto's philosophy comes through in his comments about making content for kids. He says he sees children as "still adults, just with less knowledge." So toilet humor and crude jokes are off the table. He's even joked with Meledandri about issuing a "no toilet humor decree" on set. (His clarification: this isn't why Wario doesn't appear in the film.)

This is meaningfully different from the dominant Western family-animation playbook. Pixar, DreamWorks and Illumination's own franchises often layer adult-targeted jokes, sometimes mildly crude, into kids' films on the theory that grown-ups need their own laughs. The Galaxy Movie avoids that, betting instead that physical action is legible across ages. Miyamoto wants grandparents, parents and kids to share the theater.

The same refusal to talk down to children shows up in Nintendo's game design. The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild famously gave players almost no tutorial, trusting them to figure out the world through exploration.

Bowser Jr. and the villain's heart

A creative emphasis Meledandri kept returning to: villains need genuine emotional motivation. The first Mario movie centered Bowser's unrequited love for Peach. The Galaxy Movie shifts that narrative weight to the father-son relationship between Bowser and Bowser Jr.

That is solid filmmaking instinct, but it is also a real evolution in how Nintendo characters get translated to film. In games Bowser is mostly a mechanical obstacle: kidnap princess, fight, lose, repeat. Giving him fatherhood as a stake forces the film to commit to him as a person rather than a boss fight. Miyamoto describes the difference himself: in games, characters repeat the same player-driven motions; in films they finally get to move freely as people.

Action design: "you must always be able to tell what's happening"

The Galaxy game's signature mechanic is gravity manipulation: characters running on tiny spherical planets, falling sideways, swinging through zero-G. Translating that to film is harder than it sounds. Miyamoto puts it bluntly. Zero gravity is fun to play but hard to read on screen, so the film mixes normal gravity with zero-G shots rather than committing fully to spatial weirdness.

His reasoning is what's interesting. He says he hates big-budget car chases where the action is so aggressive that you lose track of what is actually happening, and he wanted the audience to be able to follow the spatial logic at all times. The Bowser Jr. versus Mario fight, he says, was built so you can read every movement even at maximum intensity.

Implicitly, that is a critique of a certain kind of modern Hollywood action filmmaking, where visual chaos is treated as a feature. The Galaxy Movie argues the opposite: legibility isn't a compromise of intensity, it's the precondition for it.

The numbers behind the turning point

Commercially, the sequel has followed the original. It crossed $1 billion worldwide in its eleventh week in early June 2026 and stood at roughly $1.002 billion by June 14. In Japan it has passed ¥7.5 billion, placing it second only to the first film among Illumination releases and second among video game adaptations overall. It begins streaming on Peacock in the United States on July 30, 2026.

The rule change for Fox McCloud, the Pikmin exception plan, the reverse-pitch dynamic with Hollywood actors, the bespoke Japanese script: none of these are unrelated facts. They are all answers to the same question, which is how a Japanese game company that historically kept its franchises in separate boxes now operates at global film-franchise scale. Watching Miyamoto, the person who arguably wrote the original rulebook, describe lobbying his own colleagues to bend it is the most telling moment in the interview.

The Crank-in! original contains material we couldn't cover here, including tone and image-board design, the music collaboration with longtime Mario composer Koji Kondo, and Miyamoto's message to adults who played Mario as kids and drifted away.

Over to you: How is the Star Fox crossover landing where you live? Are people talking more about Glen Powell's casting, the new Peach and Rosalina portrayals, or the action design philosophy? And does the phenomenon of actors asking to be cast in Nintendo films ring true with what you see in your country's film coverage? Tell us in the comments.

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