I saw this on Wednesday in a theater with about a dozen other people, most of them in their 20s, but I was thinking about the way this movie engages with the audience, and the kind of audience it appeals to.
A big part of the reason I got into video games as a kid in the 1980s was because the medium was almost as young as I was. There was nobody around who knew more about it than I did, so nobody could use their superior knowledge as a justification to look down on me or boss me around. I understood, very young, that books, music, movies and sports had decades or even centuries of history and lots of old people who had decades more time than I had to learn it, and that's why I found those media to be off-putting. What made me happy as a kid was learning things nobody around me would even think to learn, but once I learned it and shared some of it with them in a way that showed I was excited about it, they found it interesting.
Today, the Mario franchise is 43 years old and the entire medium of video games slightly older. A huge part of this movie's appeal is the hundreds of references it makes to the series' history. As an adult who grew up with the franchise I appreciated all those references, but the kind of kid I was would've bounced off it had this come out back then.
A few of you brought kids with you. What would you say is their approach to learning new things? Do they prefer older things with older people who already know a lot, or do they prefer newer things where nobody else knows about it so they can be the smartest person in the room? Was the theater you saw it in pretty crowded? Did you see how other children reacted?
There are always new scientific discoveries, technologies being invented, and new art forms created with the new technologies, and these innovations create new social trends. Video games were accessible to children in the 80s thanks to their low cost, small form factor, and physical safety compared to other activities. What new technologies and trends are accessible to children today? Do they spend too much time on social media? Do they like the results they get by typing descriptions into generative AIs? Do they prefer Impossible Burgers to beef burgers? Do they appreciate the home charging and silent running of the parents' Tesla?