Nintendo Officially Owns A Movie Studio Now

It's official — Nintendo now owns a movie studio. Following an acquisition that took place earlier in 2022, Nintendo managed to lock down the deal and fully change the branding of Dynamo Pictures, which is the studio that Nintendo now owns. Having renamed it to Nintendo Pictures, will the company now try to create full-scale movies and shows based on some of our favorite games? Here's everything we know.

Nintendo closed the deal in July 2022, officially buying out Dynamo Pictures, a studio with which it previously collaborated. In the filing, Nintendo projected that "the acquisition will have only a minor effect on Nintendo's results for this fiscal year." Even back then, it was already known that Nintendo would rename the studio, but other plans for it were pretty vague. The company has only revealed that the acquisition is meant to "strengthen the planning and production structure of visual content in the Nintendo group." All of this can be found in the official filing.

Prior to Nintendo taking the reins, Dynamo Pictures maintained an impressive portfolio of both animation and motion capture projects. It worked on several games, including Nintendo's own "Pikmin," as well as "Death Stranding and "Resident Evil." It also collaborated with Studio Ghibli on "Earwing and the Witch" and it assisted motion capture work in "Ghost in the Shell." What will the studio do now that it's in Nintendo's hands?

Of course, when hearing about the acquisition, the first thing that comes to mind is that Nintendo might want to get involved in some game adaptations. After all, it has a well-loved catalogue of titles that could be ported to the big (or small) screen. After the success of "Pokémon: Detective Pikachu," it's clear that there is a market for these types of movies — provided they are made with respect to the source material.

Nintendo is, in fact, working on a movie adaptation of one of its most beloved games right now: "Super Mario Bros." With stars such as Chris Pratt, Anya Taylor-Joy, and Charlie Day doing the voice acting, the movie is scheduled for release in the first half of 2023. Nintendo could begin to engage in additional projects now that it has a movie studio. Similarly, ex-Dynamo could aid Nintendo in adding more visuals to its games, including cinematics, cutscenes, and more.

Nintendo itself hasn't made it clear what exactly it plans to do. It would certainly be fun to see some of Nintendo's biggest titles turned into cinema-worthy movies, but as we know, it's a tricky line to balance between "awesome" and "tacky."