“Super Mario Bros. Movie” scored a massive $204 million in its opening weekend.
Wahoo! “The Super Mario Bros. Movie” racked up a blockbuster $146 million in its opening weekend and powered to $204.6 million in its first five days of release, squashing expectations and steamrolling the competition at the domestic box office.
The animated movie, a collaboration between Illumination, Nintendo and Universal, has landed a number of records, thanks to positive word-of-mouth, nostalgia for the popular video game, and a huge turnout from family audiences. It currently stands as the biggest opening weekend of the year (overtaking “Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania” with $106 million), as well as the second-best debut ever for an animated title (surpassing 2016’s “Finding Dory” with $135.1 million). It’s also the highest-grossing debut for Illumination, beating 2015’s “Minions” with $115.7 million.
“Super Mario Bros. Movie” scored another $173 million at the international box office, pushing its global tally to a mighty $377 million. It carries a $100 million production budget.
“Cinemas around the world were filled with kids and families drawn by the communal fun that the film promised and delivered in this perfectly executed video game adaptation,” says Paul Dergarabedian, a senior Comscore analyst. “This is great news for theaters.”
And cinemas, which have been especially starved for family films, were certainly game to celebrate the big turnout, with chains like Cinemark issuing rare statements on the performance of an individual film.
“’The Super Mario Bros. Movie’s’ strong performance with the family audience this weekend is just another example of the consistent consumer enthusiasm for seeing great films on the big screen,” said Wanda Gierhart Fearing, Cinemark’s chief marketing and content officer. “Moviegoers have demonstrated time and time again that they crave the immersive, cinematic experience only theaters can provide.”
Heading into the weekend, “Mario” was expected to collect $86 million over the weekend and $125 million in its first five days of release, but projections were revised up — and revised up again — as the weekend progressed.
“The box office just kept growing and growing,” says Jim Orr, Universal’s president of domestic distribution.
