Mamma mia.
Nintendo has dropped the first trailer for The Super Mario Bros. Movie, revealing Chris Pratt's voice as the titular plumber — and, well, it sounds exactly like Chris Pratt. Mario only speaks a few lines in the trailer, but he doesn't appear to have the thick Italian accent he does in the games, although there's a hint of a very slight accent as he says, "Mushroom Kingdom, here we come!"
The trailer also shows off Jack Black as Bowser, Keegan-Michael Key as Toad, and Charlie Day as Luigi. Not much in the way of a plot is revealed, but the footage suggests Mario is entering the Mushroom Kingdom for the first time in the film, as he asks, "What is this place?" In a live stream premiere of the trailer, Pratt said it's "been a life-long dream of mine to become Mario."
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But the actor's casting in the role caught the internet by surprise, to say the least, when it was announced last year. Fans struggled to picture him as Mario, questioning why Nintendo and Illumination didn't cast an Italian voice actor, or even just the actor who plays him in the games.
In June, Pratt told Variety he was "really proud" of the voice he developed for the character, teasing that it's "updated and unlike anything you've heard in the Mario world before." Ever since, speculation ran rampant about what he would sound like as Mario, leading to a rather anticlimactic conclusion when it was seemingly just his regular voice.
The Super Mario Bros. Movie hits theaters in April 2023 — though if the Sonic movie taught us anything, the possibility of last-minute tweaks to the voice being made before then shouldn't be ruled out.
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