Spoiler Warning! The following article contains major spoilers for The Super Mario Galaxy Movie. If you’ve yet to watch the new video game movie, please jump on the closest Launch Star out of here!
Though The Super Mario Galaxy Movie is far from being a critical darling with reviewers (including our own review) since landing on the 2026 movie schedule, the latest adventure for Nintendo’s number one star is full of enough Easter eggs, surprises, and potential for spin-offs to make audiences go Mario crazy! On top of all of the surprises throughout the sequel to the massive 2023 animated hit, the movie also makes a major change to one of the franchise’s most iconic characters: Princess Peach.
Peach, also known as Princess Toadstool when she was first introduced in 1985’s Super Mario Bros. game, has been Mario’s love interest and trusted ally. Well, near the end of The Super Mario Galaxy Movie, it’s revealed that Peach isn’t the daughter of King Toadstool like in the games, but instead is Princess Rosalina’s long-lost sister. But did you know this idea was in the works for years? Let me explain…
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How The Super Mario Galaxy Movie Handles The Big Reveal
At the start of The Super Mario Galaxy Movie, Rosalina (played by massive video game fan Brie Larson) reads stories about Princess Peach, Mario, and Luigi (and Donkey Kong) to the Lumas, her adoptive children. While this initially feels like a way to sum up the plot of the first film, it later becomes clear that there’s another reason Rosalina knows so much about the ruler of the Mushroom Kingdom. It’s later revealed that Peach is Rosalina’s younger sister, whom she sent away years earlier to protect her from evil forces.
The big reveal, which comes near the climax of the movie, both in terms of action and emotion, sees the two long-lost sisters reconnecting after Peach spent much of the film wondering where she came from and how she ended up in the Mushroom Kingdom. It’s done so well and instantly became one of the standout moments of the film.
It Turns Out, The Seeds Were Planted 20+ Years Ago
A long-standing rumor of the Super Mario Bros. franchise, the big reveal that Princess Peach is Rosalina’s long-lost sister seems like the type of lore created solely for a movie to differentiate itself from the source material, but that’s not entirely the case. After seeing the movie for myself, I looked into the connection between the two characters to see if there was something I had missed over the years.
It turns out that while the bond shared by the two characters was never made explicitly clear in any of the games to feature both (imagine if this was revealed after winning enough stars in Mario Party Superstars), it was something that had been percolating for years. When speaking with Forbes ahead of the film’s release, series creator Shigeru Miyamoto revealed that there was talk of exploring that relationship back when 2007’s Super Mario Galaxy game was in development:
When we were developing Super Mario Galaxy, the director for that game, Yoshiaki Koizumi, and I were discussing what Rosalina and Peach’s actual relationship was. We had this vague idea about what their actual relationship could be, and how it would play into the concept of space. We had a lot of discussion about this, but we never came to a conclusion. So we decided that let’s take this opportunity to give this idea some meat and get into the specificity of it, and we had a lot of fun having this discussion back and forth."
Why those plans never materialized wasn’t addressed in the interview, but, amazingly, Miyamoto was able to take a rough plan from two decades ago and turn it into a big surprise that genuinely shocked audiences in 2026.
While we still don't know what the future holds for the Mario film franchise, it will be exciting to see how this massive change to Princess Peach's lore plays out from here...
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