Yeah, there were THREE credits scenes. One at the start of the credits, one in the middle, and one at the very end.
Having slept on it and let the hype die down, I now feel like the movie was just okay. Fun and charming, absolutely, but I kinda feel like the visuals and the references were where the film's highest priorities laid. The story was both simple and yet a bit overstuffed. I know we shouldn't expect too much depth from these characters since the games themselves rarely offer much besides "Bowser kidnaps Peach and Mario must save her," but when the film does try to examine its characters, their backstories, and what makes them tick, it does both an excellent job of fleshing them out and, strangely, not enough. I guess you could say that I liked what little bits of character exploration that the film had that it left me wanting more, which is what a movie is supposed to do, but that "more" that I want is also what I wish had been in this movie but wasn't.
If I'm being completely honest (and this is not spoiler territory since we see what I'm about to vaguely talk about in the trailers), I kinda feel like both the Donkey Kong and Mario Kart/Rainbow Road parts of the movie were extra fluff that only contributed to the fanservice references instead of substantial, meaningful aspects of the film's narrative. It might be blasphemous to say this, but I actually kinda wish that both of those had been left out of the film (potentially saved for sequel content) to give more focus to the main story surrounding Mario, Peach, and Toad, which kinda felt underdeveloped. It had really good moments in it, but the Donkey Kong and Mario Kart parts kinda took away from it just to add more fanservice.
Now, don't get me wrong. I understand that the Donkey Kong parts did serve some degree of importance to Mario's personal growth, and that something like it needed to happen in order for Mario to properly complete his personal journey by the movie's end, but the movie could have done something similar with Mario overcoming a different challenge against a Mario game enemy instead of Donkey Kong (again, not a spoiler, we saw it in the trailers), so that the story could keep things tigher and more interpersonal between the trio of Mario, Peach, and Toad, instead of blowing things out of proportion with an entire Mad Max-style Mario Kart race fleet. Less "spectacle for spectacle's sake" and more growing character dynamics.
Of course, that would also require Mario, Peach, and Toad to go seeking something other than what they went looking for in the movie, but there's a million different McGuffins from the Mario games out there that they could go looking for instead. The end result of their quest could be the same as it was in the final movie, but with the added bonus of more completed character arcs than what we got.
But in the end, this is all just me nitpicking and feeling a bit personally overwhelmed by how pop culture nowadays feels like endless references have become the end-all be-all for what nerds want to see in today's media, treating fanservice as more important than solid storytelling and character writing. The sheer volume of references in the movie and the near pathological adherence to make everything in this movie super-accurate to the games (regardless of whether or not all of that made sense in this movie's universe) kinda made it feel like the movie was psychologically terrified of ever being compared to the 1993 film, which was infamous for its being such a drastic departure from the games.
