The Super Mario Galaxy Movie is out in theaters now, and after a terrific opening weekend, it’s certainly on its way to another $1 billion box office return. It’s already nearing $400 million at the box office, and the movie has been out for five days. It’s well on its way to being the preeminent movie of 2026, at least financially speaking.
With box office success like that, it’s very apparent that a lot of people are seeing this movie. Any movie that people see at such a high rate will be talked about, and The Super Mario Galaxy Movie is certainly being talked about. The conversation is not a fun one to be involved in, though, and it has morphed the movie into some sort of weird cultural breaking point.
Why Has The Super Mario Galaxy Movie Become This Important?
Discourse around anything these days is generally insufferable. The Internet culture we live in forces people into a box on either extreme when it comes to anything. Nothing can just be what it is. It either has to be (insert insanely positive descriptor here) or (insert wildly negative descriptor here). It must be either the best or the worst.
This is true of everything, but it’s really reaching a boiling point with The Super Mario Galaxy Movie. There’s a massive divide between the two camps of people who are seeing the movie. It’s illustrated best by the split in Rotten Tomatoes scores. 41% of critics gave it a positive review, while 89% of audiences did.
That sort of split always comes with a disagreement. “Critics don’t know what they’re talking about. Remember that they gave (insert movie that is poorly perceived here) a positive score? The audience score is the only one that matters,” people say every time.
For starters, it’s a ridiculous sentiment. It is based on the idea that for someone to like something, everyone else must like that same thing. If critics don’t like a movie and you do, that’s fantastic. If you don’t like a movie and critics do, that’s also fantastic. Art is neither universal nor objective.
Secondly, it often seeks to discredit a group of people who dislike something. Critics of The Super Mario Galaxy Movie claim it has a very thin plot, poorly developed characters, and exists solely to make references back to the video game series it is based upon. The defense of the movie is largely one of two arguments.
The main argument is that it doesn’t matter because it’s Mario. Simply having the characters, items, gameplay mechanics, and more on a big screen during a feature-length film is enough for the movie to be good. The other argument is that it’s clearly made with children in mind, so who cares if critics, who are not children, don’t like it?
This happens all the time, and it happened with the first movie, The Super Mario Bros. Movie. This same conversation was being had, but perhaps because the reception of The Super Mario Galaxy Movie is a bit worse, the discussion has intensified.
It has become a weird breaking point. If you don’t like the film, you’re an idiot who must not have played the games, which I have, but I find the idea of making that almost a prerequisite to enjoy a movie is in poor taste. What about the people who haven’t played it? Don’t you want them to like the movie, too?
If you do like the film, you are obviously not into real art, and you like jingling keys in front of you as a form of entertainment. You probably like watching movies split into 96 parts on TikTok with Subway Surfers taking up the bottom half of the screen. The reality is somewhere in the middle, which is where I find myself.
The movie is very thin narratively. The first movie put just a little bit of effort into the plot, characters, and emotional beats. There’s even less effort this time, and it has made a huge difference in the quality of the movie. The characters are extremely thin, as most of them don’t even have one discernible character trait.
At 98 minutes, the pacing is off the charts quick, but there are so many things that drag and could easily be cut. Character motivations are nonexistent or poorly developed, and there are no meaningful relationships between characters.
But at the same time, it is pretty awesome to see the Bowser planet on the big screen. Star Fox being in a Mario movie is so cool. The finale, with a Super Mario Maker scene and then Dry Bowser as a “final boss” of sorts, is a lot of fun.
So I find myself agreeing a little bit with both of these hostile camps, and I can’t, for the life of me, understand why this movie of all movies has become the breaking point. It makes no sense that people are seemingly willing to die on the hill that it’s either the best or worst movie they’ve ever seen.
On the one hand, The Super Mario Galaxy Movie was so clearly made without a single care for making an actual movie. It’s a story reverse-engineered to fit Easter eggs and references into a 98-minute box. On the other hand, I found myself enjoying several parts of it.
Why does it have to be one or the other? Unfortunately, this isn’t the first time this conversation has been had, and it’s not the last time it’s going to be had. We as a society don’t have to accept just barely passable video game adaptations anymore. They can be good. But we also don’t have to be so unwilling to accept the bad ones if people really enjoy them.
Conclusion
In conclusion, people should like what they like. If you didn’t like The Super Mario Galaxy Movie, which I kind of didn’t, that’s fine. There are other movies out there, and there is a brilliant game of the same name that you’d probably enjoy more. If you did like it, that’s great (and I may be a bit jealous that I’m not in the same boat) because it means you had a good time at the movies.
