IGN gave the Mario movie a 5. Gotham Knights got a 7.
The Original Review
“The Super Mario Bros. Movie is gorgeously animated, but it's more interested in reminding you of things you love than in telling a story of its own.”
Let's open the spreadsheet. In the same era this review was written, IGN handed a 7 to Gotham Knights (capped at 30fps on purpose), a 7 to Battlefield 2042 (shipped without a scoreboard), and a 7 to The Callisto Protocol (a jump-scare hallway with a season pass). Then The Super Mario Bros. Movie walks in — finished, functional, zero microtransactions, zero day-one patch — and receives a 5. On IGN's own ruler, a game that launched without voice chat outranks the most successful animated film of the decade by two full points. That is not a scoring system. That is a raffle where the tickets are on fire.
And the reasoning is a family heirloom. This is the publication that once docked a Pokémon game for having 'too much water,' and the review reads like they've been chasing that high for a decade: the central complaint about the Mario movie is, functionally, that it contains too much Mario. The mushrooms reference mushrooms. The plumber plumbs. This is like returning a dictionary because it kept containing words, or one-starring a lighthouse for being too into beams.
Now the control group. CinemaScore audiences gave it an A. The Rotten Tomatoes audience number parked at 95% and refused to move. It grossed $1.36 billion, making it the biggest video game movie in history. Against that dataset stands IGN's 5 — a score their games desk reserves for products that crash. Here's the statistical miracle: the one time in a fiscal year when normal humans — parents budgeting a Saturday matinee — actually google an IGN score, the famous 7/10 factory chose that exact moment for its first work stoppage since the Obama administration. Broken $70 live-service games get the benefit of the doubt; a cartoon plumber gets the audit.
I ran the regression twice. There is no model in which 'playable Gotham Knights experience' sits two points above 'movie a billion people liked' unless the ruler is made of soup and somebody's been drinking the ruler. Five out of ten for Mario, seven for the scoreboard-less shooter: the math ain't mathing.
