Miyamoto implies that Smash Bros movie won't happen any time soon

By Sickr on April 1, 2026

The legendary Shigeru Miyamoto and Illumination CEO Chris Meledandri have sat down for a lengthy interview as part of the promotion for the long-awaited The Super Mario Galaxy Movie which launches in cinemas worldwide today. Naturally the idea of a Nintendo cinematic universe was brought up in the interview as many fans would love to see a Smash Bros-style movie featuring an all-star cast of iconic Nintendo characters, but Mr. Miyamoto shut that down for the time being.

With the addition of characters like Pikmin and ROB in the movie and others, I see a lot of people think about the idea of a Super Smash Bros.-style "Nintendo Cinematic Universe." How much do you want to grow Mario's world to bring in other characters?

Miyamoto: Right off the bat, I'll say that unlike something like Super Smash Bros., I don't think you'll have a situation [where] all Nintendo characters would be joining. As you know, my rule is that Pikmin can appear in any [Nintendo] series.

As we're working on this movie, I re-realized how varied and how multi-talented the Mario cast is. When we had kind of ideas from Illumination about, "What about this character? What about that character?" I was like, "Oh yeah, that's right. We had this. Oh yeah, that's right. We had that character." So it really kind of reaffirmed the varied nature of characters in the Mario world. We have plenty of characters to create a movie, and yet we wanted to add a little bit of spice, a little bit of secret cameos here and there. And you'll see that there's one secret character that plays a big role.

So I think there might be introductions of characters like this potentially in the future, something like that.

Meledandri: When you use the term universe, it conjures up for me this idea that there's a group of really smart people in a room with charts up on a wall and they're planning the next 10 years of how all the characters might be weaving in and out of movies. Our process is actually very different from that. It's much more geared toward conversations about what would be fun within a certain scene in the movie. So these ideas come up based on, "Oh, wouldn't it be fun if the Pikmin appeared here? Wouldn't that be fun?" And then that conversation, if we agree that it's a fun idea, then we look to Miyamoto-san to just make his own judgment about whether or not it feels right to him, but it's much more incidental than strategic.

Thanks to Greatsong1 and MasterPikachu6 for sending in the news tip!