The rumor vine has been suggesting that Nintendo has licensed out Mario for a new animated movie to a Hollywood studio for a while now; now, we have official confirmation of that fact. Nintendo confirmed in an investors call that a Super Mario animated movie will be coming, courtesy of the studio Illumination Entertainment, the same folks who brought us Minions and Despicable Me.
The film will be co-funded by Universal Studios and Nintendo, with Universal distributing it worldwide. This is, of course, not the first major Mario movie- there was a live action adaptation of the movie that came out in 1993, and it was an utter trainwreck, actually kicking off the trend of movies based on video games almost universally sucking.
As of right now, we don’t know much about the movie itself; presumably, it hasn’t started production yet. Hopefully, more information on it will be coming shortly.