Why sell someone a new console when a film can remind them to use the one they already own?
Nintendo's results for the year ended 31 March 2024 offer a useful answer. The company sold fewer Switch consoles than the year before. Yet Mario Kart 8 Deluxe still sold 8.18 million copies during that year. Nintendo said The Super Mario Bros. Movie had helped sales of Mario games.
A cinema release was doing work beyond the cinema.
I like this story because it gets past the usual talk about turning a game into a film. The interesting part is what happens afterwards. Someone leaves the screening with Mario in their head. Nintendo already has somewhere for that attention to go.
The game is waiting.
This was not a business where everything was racing upwards. Nintendo reported Switch hardware sales of 15.70 million units, down 12.6%. Software sales were 199.67 million units, down 6.7%. These are Nintendo's reported sell-in figures, not a count of purchases at shop tills.
That makes the Mario result more interesting. A familiar character could help sell an existing game while the platform's overall unit sales were falling. Nintendo did not need every customer to buy another machine before it could sell them something else.
Read that again. The machine already in the house still had a job to do.
Nintendo's own explanation matters here. In its May 2024 results, it said the film, released in April 2023, positively affected sales of Mario-related titles. It named Mario Kart 8 Deluxe as an example. That is the company's assessment. It did not say exactly how many extra copies the film caused people to buy.
So I would not put every one of those sales down to a cinema ticket. People buy Mario Kart for plenty of reasons. The useful evidence is narrower: Nintendo reported a benefit across the film and games, rather than treating them as separate businesses with separate audiences.
My view: that is a much better use of a famous character than putting its face on another piece of merchandise and hoping familiarity does the selling.
There is a practical route from interest to purchase. Enjoy Mario on screen. Recognise him in a game. Play with people who already know who he is. The customer does not need a lengthy explanation of what the brand means.
Nintendo also had fresh games to sell. The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom sold 20.61 million copies in that financial year. Super Mario Bros. Wonder sold 13.44 million. The company was giving people new reasons to play while its existing catalogue kept earning its place.
Translation, in plain English: an older product does not become useless because the launch campaign is over.
There is a limit to what this tells us. Across Nintendo as a whole, revenue was 1,671.8 billion yen and operating profit was 528.9 billion yen. Those are different measures. Neither number is the profit from Mario, and Nintendo's results also benefited from exchange-rate movements. The film cannot take credit for the whole company.
What it can show is a way of making an established product feel relevant again without pretending it is new.
That is harder than buying attention. The next thing you offer has to fit. A cinema audience enjoying a character has an obvious reason to consider a game featuring that character. Attach an unrelated product to the same face and the connection gets weaker.
I would judge a brand extension by that fit. Does it give people a sensible next thing to buy or do? Or does it just add another logo to a shelf?
Nintendo had a game ready when people came out of the cinema. For a business with products customers already recognise, that is worth more thought than another launch countdown.