'The Super Mario Bros. Movie' smashes records, tops $1 billion at the box office

By Nicole Lyn Pesce

Here we go! Universal's animated hit with Nintendo and Illumination has become the highest-grossing videogame adaptation of all time. Here's why Nintendo's new flick isn't suffering the same fate as that 1993 live-action 'Mario Bros.' movie.

Hey, Mario's a pro at collecting gold coins, right?

"The Super Mario Bros. Movie" has been setting high scores since it first warped into movie theaters on April 5, earning $1.02 billion at the worldwide box office in just 26 days.

The animated adaptation of Nintendo's (7974.TO) iconic Super Mario Bros. franchise produced with Illumination ("Despicable Me" and "Minions") by Comcast's (CMCSA) Universal Pictures wasn't expected to be a dud, by any means -- Mario is an international icon, after all, and one of the best-selling videogame franchises in the world for about 40 years now. But plucky plumbers Mario and Luigi have been smashing box office records over the past several weeks the same way that their videogame avatars easily bust through blocks. They collected $204.6 million domestically ($375.6 million globally) over the movie's long Easter opening weekend -- and really surprised the film industry with an unexpectedly high $94 million haul over its second weekend. It led U.S. ticket sales for four straight weekends.

To put this into perspective, the Mario movie has beaten "Frozen II" to become the biggest animated global opening of all time. It's just the 10th animated film to reach the $1 billion milestone, and the first since 2019. And it's the biggest videogame-inspired blockbuster yet; nearly doubling the global take of the second highest-grossing videogame movie, which was 2019's "Pokémon: Detective Pikachu" with $433 million.

As Mario himself would say, "Wahoo!" It's even surpassed Mario creator Shigeru Miyamoto's expectations. "I was very surprised that it went beyond what I could have imagined when it finally came out," he told Japanese press, as translated by videogame news outlet VGC

"The biggest surprise has been the movie's staying power," Paul Dergarabedian, senior media analyst for Comscore, told MarketWatch. "To have a second weekend like that was monumental."

He explained that a movie with an opening weekend the size of "Mario's" would normally have seen ticket sales drop around 60% the following week. This is because some blockbusters (like many of Disney's (DIS) Marvel movies) tend to open huge thanks to the buildup in anticipation from marketing, plus the core audience that rushes to see the latest installment in theaters ASAP. But in the second weekend and beyond, interest wanes, and the audience size and box office tends to drop off. In other words, the folks who really wanted to see the movie went and saw it already.

But "Mario" only fell around 40% its second weekend, which Dergarabedian said is "almost unheard of" for a movie that opened this big. Such staying power suggests "an absolute outpouring of enthusiasm, and repeat viewing, as well," he said.

What's more, "The Super Mario Bros. Movie" is an early contender to be one of the highest-grossing movies of 2023 -- something the cringy and critically-panned 1993 live-action adaptation, "Super Mario Bros." starring Bob Hoskins as Mario and John Lequizamo as Luigi, didn't come close to doing.

Mario's super appeal

So what's powered up the present-day movie to perform so much better than the '90s dud?

Choosing to go the animated route and give the movie a PG rating was a smart choice for a fantastical franchise set in the Mushroom Kingdom, experts say. The movie sees the Mario brothers helping Princess Peach (voiced by Anya Taylor-Joy) and her anthropomorphic toadstool subjects save the world from a monstrous, dragon-like turtle (known as a "Koopa") named Bowser, who is voiced by Jack Black.

But don't let that PG rating fool you; this is not just some children's flick. "This type of movie is very much aimed at kids, but we even saw night showings doing well, which suggests adults are going," said Dergarabedian. "Adults were enjoying the movie too, and wanting to go check their brains at the door and have fun -- which is what people also do while playing videogames."

Those kids are money-makers for movie studios -- and theaters, too "The movie is benefiting from the fact that you can sell tickets five-at-a-time as families bring the kids," added Robert Thompson, professor of pop culture at Syracuse University. And that's not even getting into the tab that adults with kids can run up at the concessions stand.

Plus, Mario has got some super brand recognition. "This franchise has been out since the mid 1980s ... and unlike 'Pong,' it didn't disappear," said Thompson. "People have continued to play [Mario], and it's continued to have an existence, even outside of the game itself in memes and in references to Mario and Luigi. So you've got this long, multigenerational sense of nostalgia and identity with these characters, and deep affection for them."

In fact, Mario holds the Guinness World Record for best-selling videogame character.

And don't forget the great release date. There hasn't been any big, tentpole movie for "Mario" to contend with over the past few weeks. "Right now, without any real competition, this is a 'Mario'-dominated box office world -- at least until 'Guardians of the Galaxy' kicks off," said Dergarabedian. The third "Guardians" movie, from the Marvel Cinematic Universe, hits theaters on May 5 to give Mario and Luigi their first real competition in over a month.

So ... brace yourselves for even more videogame adaptations in the future, especially hot off of HBO's success with "The Last of Us" TV series -- which, in a funny parallel, also featured mushroom people (in the infected-by-fungus sense). But that show was much darker and more targeted to adults than the bright "Mario" movie.

"It's sort of ironic, in a nice way ... that Mario, something that started out on the small screen, now almost 40 years later would become a big-screen phenomenon," added Dergarabedian.

-Nicole Lyn Pesce

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05-01-23 0735ET

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