Nintendo may finally be coming around to adaptations of their properties. This comes after a decades-long embargo on them in the wake of the horrible Super Mario Bros. movie.
The company would not allow any of their properties (Mario, StarFox, Metroid or Zelda) to get any kind of screen adaptation.
Recently, the studio’s showing signs of letting up on the restrictions with an animated Mario film coming soon from Illumination Entertainment.
A few years back, Nintendo was reportedly considering making a live-action Netflix series based on The Legend of Zelda. The adaptation was cancelled early in the game, never actually making it out of development.
Adam Conover appeared on The Serf Times podcast and revealed that he was working on a claymation animated StarFox adaptation.
This was at the same time that the Zelda series was in the early stages of development at Netflix.
It wasn’t until the The Wall Street Journal leaked the news about the production, that Nintendo quickly shut down the adaptation:
“I worked at College Humor. We had a secret project where we were going to make a claymation version of StarFox with Nintendo. I know this because Shigeru Miyamoto came to our office…
Then, a month later, suddenly there were reports Netflix wasn’t going to do its Legend of Zelda anymore. I was like ‘what happened?’ And then I heard from my boss we weren’t doing our StarFox anymore.
I was like ‘what happened?’.
He was like, ‘someone at Netflix leaked the Legend of Zelda thing, they weren’t supposed to talk about it, Nintendo freaked out… and they pulled the plug on everything, the entire program to adapt these things.”
You could say that the entirety of future Nintendo adaptations hinges on the success of the Mario animated film. Unfortunately, there might be no chance that the studio revisits old ideas.
