Sebastian Maniscalco is lending his voice to the animated Super Mario Bros. movie as a character many fans have probably never heard of.
The comedian/actor, whose credits include the Best Picture Oscar-winner Green Book and 2019's The Irishman, talked about the Super Mario Bros. film during an interview with Bert Kreischer and revealed he's voicing Mario and Luigi's "boss" Spike. A relatively obscure character by Nintendo standards, Spike is a construction foreman who comes from the video game Wrecking Crew.
Wrecking Crew released as an arcade game titled Vs. Wrecking Crew in 1984, then as a game for the Family Computer (Famicom) and Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) a year later. The games allows players to control Mario or Luigi (or both in two-player mode) as they try and destroy a specific set of objects on each level, with Spike attempting to disrupt their efforts by chasing them or knocking them down to the lower areas of the play field.
Spike's inclusion is one of the few details that Nintendo has revealed about the Super Mario Bros. movie so far. Universal Pictures and Illumination announced the CG project in 2018, with Illumination’s Paris studio Mac Guff handling the animation and Illumination's chief executive/founder Chris Meledandri producing alongside Nintendo's Shigeru Miyamoto, the creator of the Super Mario Bros. game series. Beyond that, the film is said to be targeting a 2022 theatrical release date.
Nintendo's earlier attempt to adapt the Mario games for the big screen resulted in 1993's Super Mario Bros., a live-action film that flopped at the box office while earning poor reviews for its bizarre and confusing efforts at re-imagining the original games. Although the movie went on to gain a cult fandom, its failure scared Nintendo off from making another live-action adaptation of its games until 2019's Pokémon: Detective Pikachu film.
Earlier this year, it emerged that Nintendo canceled its plans for a live-action Legend of Zelda series at Netflix after the news leaked in 2015, along with the other projects it was developing at the time (like a claymation Star Fox adaptation). With no signs of Detective Pikachu 2, that leaves Illumination's Super Mario Bros. as the only Nintendo film making clear progress right now.