A new company named ‘Nintendo Studios’ has been spotted in copyright listings for the upcoming Super Mario animated movie.
Although the listings appear to have been present on the United States Copyright Office website for some time, they were only recently spotted by Twitter user MichaelO2k.
The listings show copyright records for the upcoming Mario movie, and indicate that the film’s copyrights are registered to Nintendo of America, Nintendo Co Ltd, Illumination Entertainment and Universal Pictures.
However, it also lists two other companies: Nintendo Studios LLC and M Brothers Productions LLC.
Although the listings don’t give any further information on these companies, it appears that Nintendo Studios may be a new subsidiary set up by Nintendo to handle future visual entertainment such as movies or TV shows.
Similar subsidiaries include Marvel Studios LLC and PlayStation Studios LLC, which are subsidiaries of Walt Disney Studios and Sony Interactive Entertainment respectively.
M Brothers Productions, meanwhile, is likely a limited-time company set up purely for the purposes of making the Super Mario movie, a practice which is common in filmmaking.
For example, Marvel Studios’ early movies also had single-film companies set up: Iron Works Productions LLC for Iron Man, and Incredible Productions LLC for The Incredible Hulk.
The fact that a company called Nintendo Studios exists, however, gives further weight to Nintendo’s claims that it plans to make more movies and/or TV shows starring its characters in the future.
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Speaking at an investor Q&A in November 2021, Shigeru Miyamoto stated that Nintendo intends to create more movies based on its IP.
Miyamoto confirmed that Nintendo would like to make movies based on series other than Super Mario, because he said people should be experiencing the company’s franchises in a variety of ways instead of just video games.
These movies would be tackled one by one, he added, rather than having a number of them in production simultaneously.
It was claimed last year that Illumination could be planning a standalone Donkey Kong movie as its next Nintendo feature.
Source: https://www.videogameschronicle.com/news/nintendo-studios-film-company/
