Nintendo, always hungry to broaden their horizons, have cast their watchful eyes to the silver screen. Speaking with a number of production companies, the company is looking to expand their output by delving into video content.
Although this announcement of video content may not in fact mean feature films, that’s where our imagination takes us isn’t it? Images of Link locked in combat with Ganon on our cinema screens at last! Of Samus blasting Ridley on a gigantic alien pirate ship, like a vamped up version of the film that it takes its cues from (Aliens).
“We’re talking with various partners. I think we’ll be able to decide something in the not-too-distant future,” said Tatsumi Kimishima, the President of Nintendo. In his interview with the Asahi newspaper Kimishima San indicated that there wouldn’t be any specific projects announced at present, but that there would be something announced within five years.
Nintendo has of course licensed its content in films before for things like the Pokémon movie (1998), and the disastrous Super Mario Bros (1993), but Kimishima San made it clear that Nintendo would very much like to create its own content this time. (If the Super Mario Bros movie is anything to go by, then that sounds like a brilliant move.)
It doesn’t come as much surprise this diversification. After the financial down stroke that was the Wii U, the company has since inked a deal with NBCUniversal allowing them to facilitate theme-park attractions based on Nintendo lore. Nintendo seems to be keeping alternate strategies in its periphery, something the company has shown is valid strategy in the past (see the seismic success of the original Wii).
For now we just have to wait for the first announcements, and while we wait, we can dream of our favourite videogame heroes finally given justice on the biggest screen of them all.
