For anyone who’s been holding out hope for a subbed US release of The Super Mario Bros. Movie with performances from the film’s Japanese voice-acting cast intact, your time has finally come, but it won’t last very long.
It’s not really clear when, exactly, Illumination and Universal’s Super Mario Bros. Movie will step off the other movies’ necks and let someone else have a turn at being number one at the box office. But beginning this Friday, Japanese-language screenings of the film will begin showing “for a limited time only” in select theaters in Honolulu, Los Angeles, Seattle, Toronto, New York, San Francisco, and Vancouver.
While the movie’s English-speaking voice cast does a perfectly adequate job bringing all of the Mario games’ classic characters to life, they’re different enough from their video game counterparts that it might be hard for some to get over how, for example, Princess Peach just sounds like Anya Taylor-Joy speaking in her regular voice. The same can probably be said of the movie’s Japanese-language cast if you really listen closely enough, but it’s likely that version of the movie simply not being in English is going to do a lot for US theatergoers when it debuts here on April 28th.
