I was not having a good day Sept. 23. I’ll spare you the details, but suffice to say my mental health was in the gutter. So, I’m already miserable, waiting for my three-hour class to start, and that’s when I get the text: “Chris Pratt has been cast as the voice of Mario in Illumination Entertainment’s upcoming ‘Super Mario Bros.’ movie.” 

As if my day couldn’t have gotten any worse.

Anybody who knows me knows I’m a huge Nintendo fan. Growing up, I lived for the two hours a day I was allowed to play the family Wii. You wouldn’t find me on a car ride without my black DS Lite with the broken hinge in hand, avidly playing “Mario Kart.” “The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild” even helped me decide to pursue a career in sound design. 

Needless to say, I associate Mario (and company) with countless hours of joy and happy memories.

If you’d told my 7-year-old self that a Mario movie was coming out, I’d be beyond stoked; but these days, I’m less enthusiastic. When I found out last year that Illumination Entertainment and Nintendo had partnered to make an animated “Super Mario Bros.” film, the thought of the studio behind the depressingly vapid “Minions” and “Minions 2: The Rise of Gru” adapting this globally-beloved franchise was disheartening.

I don’t hate everything Illumination has put out — "Despicable Me” and “Sing” are tolerable — but more often than not, the studio’s films are nothing more than stylistically vacant cash grabs. Their visual style is bland; it screams cookie-cutter, Hollywood CGI children’s movie. And don’t get me started on Illumination’s writing conventions.

I know without a shadow of a doubt this movie will have a fart joke. Chris Pratt’s Mario is going to fart, the children in the theater will erupt into laughter, and I will weep. 

Unfortunately, the other casting choices for this film don’t appear to be any better than our unfortunate Chris Pratt situation.  

I believe that, when evaluated based on their individual merit, most of these actors are great. Jack Black, Anya Taylor-Joy, Charlie Day, Keegan-Michael Key and many more have each proven themselves as true talents time and time again. But no amount of talent can distract from how confusing these casting choices are. No matter how hard I try, I struggle to imagine the voices of any of these humans coming out of the faces of Mario characters. 

The shock of Pratt’s gruff, action movie star voice emerging from Mario’s mouth every time he says “Let’s-a-go” is nearly inconceivable. Will Luigi squeal in classic Charlie Day fashion for comic-relief? Is Toad going to sound like regular old Keegan-Michael Key, or is he going to screech in typical Toad style? 

I just cannot fathom any way that this casting works unless the movie takes some serious creative liberties with the characters. And knowing how protective Nintendo is of its intellectual properties, I don’t see that happening. 

Above Illumination’s reputation and the film’s casting choices, the biggest problem with this Mario movie lies within the Mario intellectual property itself. This is because Mario games, by design, do not have much of a story. The original “Super Mario Bros.” was a very gameplay-oriented experience — the story that was present only exists as a formality to justify why Mario is jumping around. 

While later Mario entries add a few details to the rough semblance of the story, this convention has remained largely unchanged. This isn’t inherently a bad thing; it's part of the franchise’s DNA. 

By the same token, that DNA is precisely why I have so little faith in the upcoming Mario movie. The lack of story in the source material has been the downfall of many big-budget films based on video games. One needs to look no further than 1993’s infamously ill-fated “Super Mario Bros.” feature to see that a new Mario movie could easily crash harder than a blue shell in “Mario Kart.”

I could touch more on how this new Mario movie exemplifies Hollywood’s senseless need to cast huge celebrities in what feels like every animated film today, or the lack of new and original ideas in mainstream filmmaking, but that’s another opinion piece altogether. 

The bottom line is, this upcoming Mario movie really gets me down. I’m not angry, and I sure as hell am not the gatekeeper of the Mario fandom, but the decisions going into this film have me feeling concerned about the direction of the intellectual property in general. 

I hope I’m wrong, but it looks like this movie might’ve picked up one too many fire flowers. Because from where I’m standing, it looks like it might go down in flames.