There was no doubt in my mind that The Super Mario Bros. Movie would be a smash hit. Yet the shock and awe around its massive opening weekend box office haul suggests that some prognosticators saw the Nintendo movie as less of a surefire bet—one whose box office success could be tempered by weak reviews, social media skepticism, or both.
Early predictions expected the movie to make a lot of money, but not quite numerous-box-office-record-breaking money. Box Office Pro, for instance, initially pegged Mario for anywhere from a $75 million to $105 million three-day weekend bow; that fell in line with Deadline’s early “conservative estimate” of $85-90 million. Box Office Pro’s revised projections later upped that total to $112 million over that first weekend, and the million-plus subscriber base of r/boxoffice offered many similar guesses in its various prediction threads.
But all those numbers paled in comparison to the actual tally after Mario’s first five days in theaters: $146 million between Friday and Sunday, and $204 million since its Wednesday opening. That’s a lotta coins for the little plumber to convert into extra lives.
It’s the biggest opening of any movie in 2023, the biggest Wednesday-Sunday opening ever, and already the highest-grossing video game adaptation of all time. It landed just behind 2018’s The Incredibles 2 for the biggest first weekend of any animated movie in the states, and 2019’s Frozen 2 for biggest opening ever for an animated film released internationally. (Speaking of international: Mario’s grand total, including all territories in which it’s been released, is almost $400 million so far. The film has been out for just under a week.)
If you don’t spend countless hours reading about box office projections and checking which movie “won the weekend” every Sunday night, all this money may not be interesting to you. But the fact that so many of the people invested in this kind of stuff waffled on whether Mario was going to be a smash at the box office is one of the more intriguing expectation-vs.-reality mismatches of late.
Months ago, I read a big Reddit thread that posited the following: “There's really no telling as to how this film will end up doing, not only with it's [sic] box office, but also in terms of the film's reception.” Even then, I found this statement to be quite bizarre. Most obvious was that whatever the Mario Movie’s Rotten Tomatoes score ended up being (not great, Bob!) had little bearing on its theatrical success. The highest-grossing animated film ever, 2019’s The Lion King remake, received mixed-to-negative reviews. (Disney also refused to call it an animated film, but I’d rather not relitigate that whole thing.) Yet Disney plus nostalgia (plus Beyoncé) is an unstoppable combo, one that Mario stood to replicate. Nintendo plus nostalgia (plus … Jack Black?) is instantly compelling to scores of moviegoers.
The moviegoers most compelled, of course, are children. Children are not particularly discerning—for better or worse—but they’re also greatly underserved by the theatrical market right now. There hasn’t been a major family-friendly film release since the slow-burning Puss in Boots: The Last Wish in December, a long-gestating Shrek spinoff that required a hefty word-of-mouth to get the ball rolling at the box office. But since The Last Wish’s holiday premiere, there’s been little else for parents to take their kids to go see until Mario’s release last week.
Whether it’s part of a franchise, a remake, or otherwise, kids movies are often skipping the theater of late. Oscar winner Guillermo Del Toro’s Pinocchio was a gorgeous reimagining of a classic story, but it didn’t go to theaters. Its fellow Animated Feature nominees this year, like The Sea Beast and Turning Red, also went straight to streaming. (Puss in Boots and the final nom, Marcel the Shell with Shoes on, both hit theaters; Marcel, an A24 film, skewed more toward an adult audience than its competitors.) Since Trolls World Tour changed movies forever by canceling its theatrical release and instead debuting digitally in March 2020, due to the pandemic shutdown, studios have found that there’s as much, if not more, money to be made by just plopping another movie onto the TV for kids to check out.
There’s one family movie studio that consistently releases films in theaters and makes big money doing it, though: Illumination Entertainment, which partnered with Nintendo to make Super Mario Bros. Advertising Mario’s connection to Minions may be a turn off to any adult with taste, but for movie-starved children, it’s a clarion call to head to the theater. Last summer’s Minions: The Rise of Gru was a huge success, earning nearly $1 billion by the end of 2022. That’s the kind of track record that a company like Nintendo wants to attach itself to, as it enters the theatrical biz for the first time.
It helps that Universal Pictures distributes Illumination’s films and thus Mario as well. Universal and Nintendo partnered in 2017 to build multiple theme parks based on its properties in Japan and the United States, with the inaugural Super Nintendo World park launching in Tokyo last winter. The timing of the first American park’s opening—February 2023 in Hollywood, California—was smart and seemingly intentional. There’s nothing like unveiling an entire theme park to help market your big film, out just two months later.
But the most obvious reason why Mario went the distance and will continue to do so is that Nintendo is a hugely beloved company, and Mario is its biggest franchise. And unlike the Pokémon spinoff game-inspired Detective Pikachu, whose grosses fell short of expectations, Super Mario Bros. plays it safe. The movie honors Nintendo’s famous franchise by playing to its strengths: a bright, wonderful world to explore; energetic pacing; and an overall pleasant, non-threatening cast of characters. (That includes you, too, Bowser!) 1993’s grotesque, live-action Super Mario Bros., this ain’t; Nintendo made sure not to repeat that alienating mistake.
It’s also not just for kids, but for their parents too. There’s a great likelihood that the parent of a young child today played a Nintendo game at some point, and the movie panders directly to them too. It’s loaded with nostalgic references to all matters of Nintendo history, whether it’s other Mario characters or less-familiar Nintendo peripherals. Think back to that Lion King example: You think it was the new generation of kids who were most hyped for that one?
After nearly 40 years of Mario games, of course his first proper animated film would be something of an event for all kinds of people. That it took so long feels unprecedented, in fact, considering how recognizable the franchise is. Fellow icon Mickey Mouse has starred in tons of movies; SpongeBob’s gotten top-billing in three; The Simpsons Movie arrived in theaters in 2007, two years before the series hit its 20th birthday. Mario fans around the world can name him and all his friends at the drop of a red hat; of course we wanted to see them on the big screen.
The cries that Mario’s success is emblematic of the kind of drivel we’re force-feeding children in lieu of smarter films are predictable. They’re also not exactly wrong. But if anyone expected Super Mario Bros. to be anything less than one of the biggest movies of all time, they’re kidding themselves—the signs were all there from the get-go.
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