Super Mario Bros. Movie the Biggest Gaming Adaptation Ever, $500m Made in Just Over a Week

wccftech.com:

The Super Mario Bros. Movie has been out for just over a week now, and while critical opinion is somewhat split, the movie is a runaway success at the box office. With only nine days of returns, Variety reports that Mario and friends have already raked in $500 million at the box office (around $260 million in North America and $248 million in the rest of the world). The movie is the highest-grossing film of 2023 thus far, bumping off Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania.

Perhaps a bigger deal, is the fact that The Super Mario Bros. Movie is now the most successful video game movie adaptation of all time. The previous record-holder was the Warcraft movie (remember that?) which brought in $439 million. Other high-earners included Detective Pikachu ($433 million) and Sonic the Hedgehog 2 ($403 million). As you can see, in the past, even successful video game movies seemed to struggle to surge beyond that low-400-million range, but Mario’s left it in the dust. In fact, the Mario movie is currently trending ahead of Avatar: The Way of Water domestically, which made “only” $231 million in North America in its first nine days.

So, what can we attribute The Super Mario Movie’s massive success to? While some have found the film unambitious, and (in the words of Wccftech’s own Ule Lopez) “average at best,” I think its predictability is part of its success. Nintendo and Universal promised a faithful version of the characters and world millions of kids and adults alike love, and they delivered.

And make no mistake, there’s nothing “lazy” about the Mario movie – it took six years to make with Shigeru Miyamoto himself being involved in the entire process. The end result is something a 30-or-40-something parent can go watch with their kids