The Super Mario Bros. Movie has become the highest-grossing video game movie ever
Just two weeks after its release, the Super Mario Bros. Movie has now achieved a gross of over $700 million. This puts it over projects such as Detective Pikachu and Sonic the Hedgehog 2 to become the most profitable gaming movie of all time. It may not be too surprising of an announcement considering its all-star cast and massive marketing push, but what has compelled so many people (including non-gamers) to see a movie about a fat Italian plumber in a kingdom of mushroom people?
Mario has been around for nearly 40 years now and has become the most famous gaming icon in the world. While Nintendo attempted to break the Mario brothers into the movie scene once before, this was less than successful. With 1993's disastrous live-action Super Mario Bros. film, we saw human-like goombas and a very strange take on Bowser. On top of that, the plumbers didn't even end up leaving Brooklyn. Needless to say, this was a bomb and deterred Nintendo from making any similar attempts to put Mario on the big screen for over three decades.
However, in 2023, the animated Mario Bros. Movie from Illumination finally launched to some impressive review scores. While critics were less than impressed, the fan score of 8.7 on Metacritic indicates that this was a commercial success. This success isn't only limited to the reception of the film, however, as the movie has now become the highest-grossing film of 2023- with a few more weeks left of showings. At the rate that the Mario Bros Movie is performing, it could end up reaching a gross of $1 billion before leaving cinemas.
This may just barely put it above Illuminations Minions' which achieved a crazy $1.159 billion during its time in theatres. With the brand power of Mario, however, we can hope that the yellow devils will be beaten out. This will then make the Mario movie Illumination's highest-grossing movie of all time- which indicates that sequel talks are already happening. With a post-credit scene and the guaranteed vast gross profit of a sequel, don't be surprised if you see a second Mario Bros. movie coming in the near future.
