The Super Mario Bros. Movie opened in April 2023 to $146M domestically on a campaign that was, by blockbuster standards, lean. No auto partner. One McDonald's deal. A functional plumbing website. A MAR10 Day activation. Critics gave it 59%. Audiences gave it 96% and $1.36B worldwide.
The novelty of Nintendo finally making a faithful Mario movie was doing the heavy lifting. That card can only be played once.
For the sequel, Nintendo replaced novelty with mechanics. The Galaxy Movie campaign is the most systematically gamified pre-release campaign a film has run and it is worth taking apart, because the design is intentional in ways that go beyond the movie.
What the campaign actually does
Starting March 10, the free Nintendo Today app delivers one digital collectible card per day. There are 40 cards total, one per day through June 10, running three months past the film's theatrical window. Each card features character artwork from the film with descriptions. No duplicates. No rare pulls. Collect all 40 and they convert to gold-bordered versions. Earn 100 My Nintendo Platinum Points for getting three.
On opening day, April 1, scan the movie poster in the theater with the app. This unlocks a commemorative digital photo frame stamped with the specific date and location you saw the film, only available on-site. The theater visit becomes a checkpoint. The ticket is proof of attendance in a system that rewards it.
Fandango's Galactic Passport layers on top: buy a ticket, unlock a Passport and a Luma badge. See it again, earn another badge, up to six. Repeat viewing is explicitly incentivized in the ticketing flow, not as an afterthought.
The campaign has two beneficiaries, and the film is only one of them
The 40 collectible cards are themed around the Galaxy Movie's characters. But they live inside Nintendo Today!, Nintendo's free smart device app. Every fan who engages with the card campaign, whether they see the film or not, is being converted into a daily Nintendo app user for three months.
The theater scan gets you to opening weekend. The daily cards keep you opening Nintendo's app through June, well into the window when Nintendo Switch 2 launches and new game titles hit. The campaign is not just selling a movie. It is using the movie as acquisition infrastructure for Nintendo's broader ecosystem.
No film campaign has structured it quite this way. The closest precedents, The Dark Knight's ARG and Free Guy's real-world challenge unlocks, were pre-release awareness plays. This is different: the engagement is designed to outlast the theatrical run by months, and the primary beneficiary shifts from the film to the platform as the campaign progresses.
Whether it moves repeat viewing numbers is a question the second and third weekend will answer. What it has already done is ensure that millions of people who open the Nintendo Today! app every morning between now and June are doing so because of a movie.
Movie marketing intel: This week in trends
TRAILER TEASE 🎬 Paramount's Passenger teaser played only in theaters and leaked anyway (Dread Central) Paramount released a 60-second teaser for André Ovredal's Passenger exclusively in theaters ahead of Primate and Scream 7. No music, no score, just tension and a jump scare that caused audible screams. It eventually leaked, but not before generating significant TikTok word-of-mouth from horror fans who had seen it in person. Paramount has since moved the film to Memorial Day weekend. In a landscape where every trailer drops online simultaneously, scarcity is becoming a genuine tactic, and for horror, the communal experience of being scared in a theater is exactly the point.
BRAND PARTNERSHIPS 🎥 Mazda is now selling cars the way movies sell themselves (Adweek) Mazda debuted a 60-second trailer during the Oscars for five genre short films shot by Oscar-winning cinematographer Hoyte Van Hoytema, with the full films dropping in April. The campaign borrowed the theatrical trailer format, genre segmentation, and staggered release model wholesale from film marketing. The more brands treat their launches like film releases, the more pressure it puts on actual films to do something those brands cannot.
CREATOR MARKETING 📊 57% of moviegoers now discover films through creators, not trailers (Snapchat) Snapchat's latest moviegoing research found more than half of respondents said creators helped them discover new films, overtaking traditional trailers as the primary channel. The same study found 30% of audiences want to see a film opening night while a nearly equal share go whenever, meaning campaigns need to sustain intent well past the premiere. For a franchise like Mario this matters less. For originals, it's a structural problem.
AUDIENCE AWARENESS 📝 Marty Supreme and the ceiling on manufactured moments (The Spectrum) A widely circulated op-ed argued that Marty Supreme's campaign, ping-pong balls, Chalamet on the Sphere, weeks of stunts, never told audiences what the film was actually about and created obligation without desire. Universal's own CMO described the Wicked campaign as approaching saturation. Worth reading as a counterweight to everything else this week: there are only so many moments a campaign can manufacture before audiences stop responding.
This Week's Movie Review: Ready or Not 2: Here I Come ★★★½ (3.5/5) Samara Weaving is still the best thing about this franchise, and the film wisely leans into her exhausted, furious energy rather than resetting her to square one. The kills are inventive, the pacing is tighter than the original, and Kathryn Newton makes a strong case for her own spinoff. What it lacks is the original's genuine surprise, that mounting sense that the film might actually go somewhere unexpected.
