While the trailer for The Super Mario Bros. Movie looks spot-on, Mario’s voice is just weird and wrong.

Obviously, it’s worth pointing out that Jack Black’s rendition of Bowser is incredible, as are the other voice actors in the trailer. It’s just that Chris Pratt’s stunt casting is just way off here.

To make matters empirically worse, someone has shown how perfect it would be to have had Charles Martinet voice Mario in the trailer by using AI to change the audio (shown below).

It’s a bit like what happened with the Detective Pikachu movie, as again we got another piece of Hollywood stunt casting with Ryan Reynolds as the titular electric mouse.

The story did try and go out of its way to explain why Ryan Reynolds needed to be there, but it didn’t really gel with what people expected.

This is far worse, as Charles Martinet has been the very recognisable voice of Mario for decades, something that gamers know full well the world over.

Considering how massive the Super Mario Bros. franchise already is, casting someone like Chris Pratt as Mario is totally unnecessary when there is already an established actor in the role.

To be fair, Nintendo is as much to blame as Universal here, as they have as much of a hand in this movie as Universal does. I just don’t get the reasoning, especially when Chris Pratt sounds so jarring voicing the role.

I mean, it’s not like people don’t know who Mario is or what he should sound like.

The rest of the trailer looks amazing though and after the awful live-action film from the 90s, it’s definitely a smart move to have taken the animated route.

One small ray of sunshine here is that Charles Martinet is at least in the movie’s credits, so maybe there will be a voice switch over at the end or something?

I suppose we will just have to wait and see once the movie is released on April 7.

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