Mario Kart set to hit smartphones, Mario movie in works

Nintendo’s foray into the smartphone world has been a success for the most part, delivering some fun gameplay experiences like Super Mario Run and Fire Emblem Heroes.

It seems like 2018 will continue this trend as the company announced that Mario Kart will be coming to smartphones.

“We plan to release a smart-device application from the Mario Kart franchise, Mario Kart Tour, during the next financial year (from April 2018 to March 2019),” the company noted during a conference call.

“We will announce further details at a later date.”

It wouldn’t be the first time that Mario Kart lands on a non-Nintendo machine, having seen arcade entries before.

Nintendo revealed plenty of information during its investor call, including a Mario Kart entry on mobile

But the conference call also had another noteworthy nugget of information,  revealing that an animated Mario movie is in the works.

“We have started development of an animated movie featuring ‘Super Mario’ with Illumination, the movie studio that brought films such as Despicable Me and Minions,” the Japanese firm announced.

“For this project Mr. Chris Meledandri, Founder and CEO of Illumination and Shigeru Miyamoto, Representative Director, Fellow of Nintendo will co-producing the film. The film will be co-financed by Universal Pictures and Nintendo, and distributed theatrically worldwide by Universal Pictures.”

There were several other tidbits via the conference call, including a September 2018 launch for the paid online service on Switch, 7.5 million units sold through for Super Mario Odyssey, 6.5 million units sold for Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, six million copies of Breath of the Wild sold and 13 million Switch consoles sold.