We can now add, to the list of things that Mario Mario regularly stomps—ambulatory mushrooms, malevolent turtles, those poor concussed Koopa Kids—his competition at the box office. Like, all of it, as Deadline reports that Nintendo and Illumination’s The Super Mario Bros. Movie is now on track to have the biggest opening weekend of an animated movie—ever.
Said success is powered by an extremely impressive weekend showing at the international box office; while the projected $195 million the movie is expected to bring in in the US this weekend is nothing to sneeze at, it’s being nearly matched by another $173 million overseas. Together, that sets the film, which stars Chris Pratt as an adequate-we-guess take on the iconic Nintendo hero, up for a $368 million opening weekend—beating out the nearest competitor in the animated field, 2019’s Frozen 2, by about $10 million.
Mario—which also stars Jack Black, Charlie Day, Keegan-Michael Key, Anya Taylor Joy, and Seth Rogen—is set to break or approach a whole bunch of records, in fact: It’s the biggest video game opening of all time, of course, smashing through the record set by Warcraft a few years back. (Here’s your regular reminder that the Warcraft movie, for some reason, did wild-good money in China, despite being a flop over here.) It’s also Illumination’s biggest opening in domestic markets by a comfortable margin—trouncing the Minions/Despicable Me franchise’s best efforts—and the second-biggest animated opening in the U.S., after Incredibles 2.
So, yeah: Suffice it to say that the “video game movie” curse is, at least in this case, pretty damn broken; that sequel hook at the end of the movie is almost certainly going to come to fruition, and probably sooner rather than later. And if Nintendo is looking at its brands to figure out what it might toss at Hollywood next, we do have some suggestions…
