The Super Mario Bros. Movie is finally in theaters, and critics are weighing in. That's about the size of what I can tell you with certainty right now, because the full critical picture is still coming together, and I'd rather be honest about that than perform a consensus that doesn't exist yet. You can read the review that tipped me off over at IGN.

What I can tell you is how it feels to be standing here, waiting. This is Mario's first trip back to the big screen since the 1993 live-action version with Bob Hoskins and Dennis Hopper, a movie that has spent three decades as shorthand for what happens when a video game adaptation goes wrong. So the bar for this one was complicated. Too reverent and it's a museum piece, too loose and you've broken the one rule fans actually care about. Illumination, the Minions studio, taking the swing was either going to be the safest possible choice or a very expensive way to anger the internet.

I haven't seen it yet, so I'm not going to pretend I have a take on the movie itself. What I will say is that I've watched every video game adaptation going back to the dark ages of the Mortal Kombat sequels, and there are basically two ways these things go. You can try to translate the game into cinema, which almost never works, or you can just be a celebration of the thing people already love. Detective Pikachu did the second one. The Sonic movies figured it out by the second try. For a Mario movie, the celebration route feels like the only sane play, and everything I'm seeing suggests that's the lane Illumination picked.

But I want to pump the brakes on the discourse either way. Opening-weekend review chatter is its own genre at this point, part genuine reaction and part referendum on whether video games deserve to be movies, a argument we've apparently agreed to re-litigate forever. I'd rather wait a week, let the dust settle, and see whether people are still talking about it after the novelty wears off. The fun ones survive that test. The hollow ones don't.

Not everything needs to be The Godfather, though. Sometimes you just want to watch a plumber ride a dinosaur. My plan is to catch it this weekend and report back with an actual review, written by a person who has actually watched the movie.

So, are you seeing it this weekend for the nostalgia, or waiting for streaming? If you've got a kid in your life, this feels like an easy win either way. If you're a 40-year-old with strong opinions about Mario's accent, well, we should talk.