Nintendo x Disney? Nintendo x Amazon? These two may actually soon be coming to pass, if these latest reports are to be believed. Though they are, so far, unsubstantiated rumors, the source in question has had a good track record with Nintendo stuff, having successfully predicted the third wave of Amiibo, including the third party characters announced; on top of that, the same source gave early word on Nintendo characters being added to Skylanders.
With that out of the way, it seems that the rumor is now going that Nintendo has struck a deal with Disney regarding media diversification of their brands. This deal includes films, video games and interactive toys/merchandise; apparently, Mario was due to appear as an Amiibo in Disney Infinity 3.0, but the companies have not yet been able to smooth out the details, which is why this is not happening. It may be an occurrence in next year’s title, however.
Apart from NFC figure cross pollination, the deal will include a Mario appearance in Wreck It Ralph 2, as well as full fledged Nintendo universe movies and merchandising- the kind of thing that Nintendo has resisted until recently, when Nintendo president Satoru Iwata confirmed that the company will look into licensing its IP more (the first results of this were the DeNA mobile game deal, as well as the Universal theme park deal).
Finally, Disney apparently wants a game spearheaded by not just Mickey Mouse, but also Mario- this would be a huge deal, it would be one of the greatest media collaborations and coups of all time. Nintendo, it seems, is accepting of this idea, but wants to take it slow, and this difference in the timeframes that both companies want to operate on seems to be the biggest issue so far.
As if Disney were not enough, it appears that Nintendo and Amazon are also close to striking a deal (which would be surprising, given the issues the two companies have had in the past). It sounds like after Nintendo made the announcement regarding its mobile games, Amazon approached Nintendo with the intent of securing their titles for their App Store as well. In return, Nintendo and Amazon seem to be working on some kind of emulation solution for Android on Nintendo’s NX system, so Nintendo can run all the games on the Amazon App Store- which would certainly explain some of the Android related NX rumors we have seen crop up in the past.
All in all, it seems that after a generation marked by nothing but failure and the threat of irrelevance, Nintendo is gearing up to make its move, and strike back with full force. Whether all of that amounts to anything or not remains to be seen.