Super Mario tops box office with year’s biggest opening
THE Super Mario Bros Movie topped the box office, taking in US$146 million in its domestic debut, the biggest opening weekend for a film so far this year.
The animated feature from Comcast’s Universal Pictures and the Illumination animation studio was forecast to bring in US$112 million in US and Canadian theatres from Friday (Apr 7) through Sunday, according to projections from Boxoffice Pro.
Super Mario was released on Wednesday to take advantage of the spring break and Easter holidays. Over the five-day period, it took in US$205 million domestically, according to Comscore. Universal said it was the best opening weekend ever for an animated film.
With a global haul of US$378 million, it’s the biggest opening of any movie so far this year, a title previously held by Walt Disney’s Marvel superhero picture Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, which opened to US$225 million in ticket sales.
Super Mario’s performance helps theatre chains such as AMC Entertainment Holdings and Regal owner Cineworld Group, which have been hurt by the slow recovery of the cinema industry.
It’s also a victory for Nintendo, the Japanese entertainment giant that created the Mario video game franchise. A previous Hollywood effort, the live-action Super Mario Bros in 1993, was panned by critics and has frequently appeared on lists of the worst films ever made.
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Nintendo’s efforts to expand the brand include a Super Nintendo World that opened at Universal’s theme park in Los Angeles in February.
Illumination, a Santa Monica, California-based studio founded by producer Chris Meledandri in 2007, has been the force behind a number of Universal’s animated hits, including Despicable Me and Minions.
“My mind is a little bit blown,” Meledandri said in an interview about the box office numbers. “I’m extremely conservative by nature, but they are beyond anyone’s wildest expectations.”
Super Mario divided critics, with just 56 per cent of professional reviewers recommending the film, said RottenTomatoes.com. It did better with regular filmgoers, where it scored 96 per cent overall. The cast includes Chris Pratt as Mario and Anya Taylor-Joy as Princess Peach.
The film opened alongside Air, an Amazon Studios film about Nike’s courtship of basketball great Michael Jordan. That movie, starring Ben Affleck and Matt Damon, generated US$20 million in domestic ticket sales to finish in fourth place.
The picture was also produced by David Ellison’s Skydance Media, which co-financed the recent Top Gun and Mission: Impossible films, and Artists Equity, a company formed last year by Affleck, Damon, and former Goldman Sachs banker Gerry Cardinale’s RedBird Capital. BLOOMBERG
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