In 1977, Shigeru Miyamoto joined Nintendo, a company then known for selling toys, playing cards, and trivial novelties. Miyamoto was twenty-four, fresh out of art school. His employer, inspired by the success of a California company named Atari, was hoping to expand into video games. Miyamoto began tinkering with a story about a carpenter, a damsel in distress, and a giant ape. Four years later, Miyamoto had turned the carpenter into a plumber; Mario, and the Super Mario Bros. franchise, had arrived.

Nintendo is riding high off the runaway success of its new, hybrid Nintendo Switch game console. The Japanese gaming giant dominated industry sales charts for both hardware and software in October thanks to high demand for the Switch and the release of the hotly anticipated Super Mario Odyssey, a flagship game for the system. Nintendo's brands are so hot right now that the best you can hope for on Black Friday is the Switch being in stock at all. The company is also using this success as an opportunity to break one of its longstanding traditions of not doing much outside the realm of video games. Back in June, Nintendo announced a Super Nintendo World theme park addition to Universal Studios Japan, set to open in 2020.

I come here not to praise The Mummy but to re-bury it. Tom Cruise remains a movie star no matter what kind of nonsense tries to bring him down. If he can survive that thing with the couch, he can survive anything. But the failure-to-launch of The Mummy would jeopardize more than careers and studio marketing budgets. The movie is supposed to start up the Dark Universe, Universal Studios' multi-movie franchise starring its monsters of yore.