The Super Mario Bros Movie continues to hit the highest of landmarks for animated features.
As reported by Video Games Chronicle, The Super Mario Bros Movie has now taken the record of the second highest grossing animated film.
At $1,294,577,622, it has now outpaced the original Frozen, which peaked at $1,284,540,518. That also means it is only second to Frozen 2, which holds the record at $1,453,683,476.
That illustrious list of top grossing animated features is filled with nearly all Pixar films, from Incredibles 2, Toy Story 3 and 4, and Finding Dory. The exceptions to this are Zootopia, which technically falls under Walt Disney Animation instead of Pixar, and Despicable 3, Illumination Pictures’ previous top grossing film.
This also places The Super Mario Bros Movie comfortably ahead of The Guardians of the Galaxy 3 as the top grossing film of 2023 to date. No one is going to say that James Gunn’s final outing with Marvel Entertainment is a flop or doing badly. At $739.4 million, it is a comfortable hit, not a record breaker.
But Disney isn’t too upset about that. Disney CEO Bob Iger actually congratulated rival Universal for the success of this movie, as Universal Pictures is The Super Mario Bros Movie’s distributor.
That wasn’t really so much about company rivalry, as it was about The Super Mario Bros Movie’s heralding the return of movie theatres, which is, of course, good for everyone in that industry.
As for Nintendo, we do know more movies are on the way using their properties. The Legend of Zelda project head Eiji Aonuma mused publicly that he would love to see a movie made about his series.
While it’s the sort of thing that’s just fun to muse about, it was interesting that Aonuma felt comfortable talking about it publicly. We have to assume that Nintendo was already making such considerations in private.
That Aonuma was public about it suggests, really, that there is a decent chance that it will happen, though it isn’t exactly confirmation.
Anyway, we would probably be more likely to see a second Super Mario Bros Movie (King Wart?), a Donkey Kong movie, or even a Luigi’s Mansion movie. Or would anyone want to see a strange little spinoff Super Mario Land movie, to introduce Princess Daisy and maybe even Wario?
Whichever the case, this has already been a slam dunk for Nintendo and Illumination Pictures.
