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

What this article covers

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 about the now-blockbuster Mario sequel (currently around ¥132.6 billion / $844M+ in worldwide gross at the time of writing). The interview revealed several behind-the-scenes details that hadn't been publicly discussed before — clustered around three themes: the rewriting of a long-standing Nintendo rule, the unusual phenomenon of A-list actors cold-pitching themselves for Nintendo voice roles, and a fully separate Japanese script written from scratch rather than localized.

This article paraphrases and contextualizes the interview for international readers. The original (interview by Hajime Tachi) is linked at the bottom — for those who can read Japanese, it's worth reading in full.

Nintendo's 40-year "rule": no IP mixing

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, these worlds are kept strictly separate. The biggest exception has long been the Super Smash Bros. fighting game series — but Miyamoto has historically explained that one away by framing it as "a toy box where characters are dolls, not 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 long-imagined Nintendo crossover that fans have been begging for through decades of Smash Bros. DLC speculation was unlocked because the company's most influential designer personally walked the halls in Kyoto convincing his colleagues.

⚡ Context for readers: Super Smash Bros., first released for Nintendo 64 in 1999, brings together not just Nintendo characters but also Sonic, Snake, Cloud, Steve from Minecraft, and dozens more. The latest entry, Super Smash Bros. Ultimate (2018), has sold over 36 million copies and is one of the Nintendo Switch's best-selling games. The reason Miyamoto says it's allowed — that the characters are "trophies / dolls in a toy box," not narratively coexisting — is the same loophole the Mario Galaxy Movie just punched through.

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

This wasn't covered in the Crank-in! piece, but in a parallel interview with Japanese gaming site Dengeki Online, Miyamoto went further. He stated that going forward, Pikmin will be designated as Nintendo's "rule-breaker" character — explicitly allowed to mix with any other IP. So 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 for 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.

It's worth noting, however, that not all longtime Nintendo fans are thrilled. Some Japanese commenters have pushed back on the "rule" framing entirely — pointing out that Metroid, F-Zero, and Star Fox have historically shared an implicit science-fiction universe (Fox's father in F-Zero's lore is a recurring fan theory), and questioning whether the rule was ever as airtight as Miyamoto suggests. More on that in the reader voices section below.

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

The other major reveal: Glen Powell (Top Gun: Maverick, Twisters) didn't just accept the role of Fox McCloud — he campaigned for it before the role even existed. Meledandri explained in the interview that during promotion of the first Mario movie, he received a phone call from Powell himself. Powell wanted Meledandri to understand how deeply he loved Fox McCloud, and how much he hoped to be part of a Star Fox film someday.

What Powell didn't know at the time was that Meledandri and Miyamoto were already in early discussions about putting Fox in the sequel. When the casting decision came around later, Meledandri called Powell back — and the timing felt, in his words, almost like fate.

According to Meledandri, this kind of unsolicited approach from actors is unusual for Illumination. Normally, the studio places the calls to talent. But for Nintendo projects specifically, actors and voice actors keep reaching out themselves, asking to be considered. Miyamoto called this "really lucky" and added that it feels new and meaningful to have a film team where everyone — animators, cast, directors — is genuinely a Mario fan.

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.

Even more striking is the Donald Glover anecdote. Glover (Atlanta, Lando Calrissian in Solo: A Star Wars Story) saw the first Mario movie and called Meledandri afterward to say, in essence, "I need to be involved in a Nintendo movie any way you'll have me. I will give you the most incredible Yoshi." The studio loved him, met with him, and the casting was effectively reverse-engineered from his enthusiasm.

🌌 Why it matters: The Super Mario Bros. Movie (2023) grossed $1.36 billion worldwide on a $100 million budget. That kind of return makes Nintendo film projects roughly equivalent in cultural and economic gravity to peak-era Pixar or Marvel — a stage where actors aren't doing it for the paycheck, they're doing it because they grew up with these characters.

There's a real generational dynamic at play here. Many American actors in their 30s and 50s today were Nintendo Entertainment System or Super Nintendo kids. Jack Black's well-publicized commitment to Bowser in the first film, and now Glover's approach for Yoshi, look less like commercial calculation and more like fan participation — actors signing up for projects that connect them back to childhood.

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 entire thing in Japanese — not as translation, but as a parallel original. The Japanese-language script was written by Makoto Ueda, the head of "Europe Kikaku" (Europa Kikaku), a Kyoto-based theater company. Miyamoto, who has known Ueda for years, wanted the Mario characters to speak with the natural conversational rhythm of Ueda's stage plays. Direct localization, he said, breaks comedic timing — Japanese and Western humor don't 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.

🎭 Context: Europa Kikaku, founded in 1998 in Kyoto, is one of Japan's better-known small theater companies. Ueda's stage play Summer Time Machine Blues (2001) was adapted into a feature film in 2005. Nintendo's headquarters being in Kyoto likely played into this collaboration too — Miyamoto and Ueda are essentially neighbors, culturally and geographically.

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

Miyamoto is unusually frank in the interview 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 player-direction symbol — a navigational arrow more than a character. He acknowledges directly that this no longer matches contemporary expectations, but argues that for games, it's hard to change because the gameplay structure depends on it.

Films, he says, are different — there, you can change everything. The first Mario movie reimagined Peach as a fighter. The sequel takes a different angle: rather than repeating the "warrior princess" beat, the film explores subtle emotional friction between Mario and Peach, plus the inner strength of Princess Rosalina. Meledandri added that at LA test screenings, female audiences specifically responded positively to how Peach and Rosalina were portrayed.

That said, this redirection isn't universally popular. Some longtime Nintendo fans have called the Galaxy Movie's Peach/Rosalina portrayal a "blatant retcon" of the games, and the reception split is real — particularly among players who have specific attachments to the characters as they 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 other franchises like Despicable Me and The Secret Life of Pets often layer adult-targeted jokes — sometimes mildly crude — into kids' films, on the theory that grown-ups need their own laughs. The Galaxy Movie deliberately avoids that, betting instead that physical action is universally legible across ages. Miyamoto wants three generations — grandparents, parents, kids — to be able to share the theater.

🎮 Aside: The "don't talk down to kids" philosophy also shows up in Nintendo's game design. The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild famously gave players (including children) almost no tutorial, trusting them to figure out the world through exploration. There's a real cultural through-line between Nintendo game design and how Miyamoto thinks about audience treatment.

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.

This is solid filmmaking instinct — the better the antagonist's emotional logic, the better the movie works — but it's also a meaningful evolution of how Nintendo characters get translated into 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, not just a boss fight. Miyamoto himself describes the difference: 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 admits it's 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.

What's interesting is Miyamoto's reasoning: he says he hates big-budget movie car chases where the action is so aggressive that you lose track of what's actually happening. He explicitly told Meledandri he wanted the audience to always be able to follow the spatial logic. The Bowser Jr. vs. Mario fight, he says, was constructed so you can read every movement clearly — even at maximum intensity.

This is, implicitly, a critique of a certain kind of modern Hollywood action filmmaking (think Transformers, Fast & Furious) where visual chaos is treated as a feature. The Galaxy Movie is making a different argument: legibility isn't a compromise of intensity, it's the precondition for it.

The bigger picture: 40 years of Mario, evolving IP strategy

Read together, the Crank-in! interview points to something larger than a single movie. Mario hits 40 years old this year (the original Mario Bros. arcade debuted in 1983, Super Mario Bros. on Famicom in 1985), and the Galaxy Movie is functioning as a turning point in how Nintendo manages those four decades of accumulated IP.

The rule change for Fox McCloud, the Pikmin "official exception" plan, the reverse-pitch dynamic with Hollywood actors, the bespoke Japanese script — these aren't unrelated facts. They're all answers to the same underlying question: how does a Japanese game company that historically kept its franchises in tightly separated boxes now operate at global film-franchise scale?

Watching Miyamoto himself — the person who arguably wrote the original rulebook — describe walking around Nintendo lobbying to bend his own rules is the most telling moment in the interview. The studio that gave the world Mario is in the middle of figuring out what it becomes next.

The Crank-in! original contains additional material we couldn't fully cover here, including details on tone design and image-board collaboration, the music collaboration with longtime Mario composer Koji Kondo, and Miyamoto's message to adults who played Mario as kids but have drifted away from the games. The full interview is worth reading directly — link below.

🌍 Over to you: The Mario Galaxy Movie is a global hit, but the cultural reception has been very different country to country. How is the Star Fox crossover landing where you live? Are people there talking more about Glen Powell's casting, the new Peach/Rosalina portrayals, or the action design philosophy? And does Hollywood's "actors begging for Nintendo roles" phenomenon ring true with what you see in your country's film coverage? Tell us in the comments.

References