The Super Mario Bros Movie is now expected to rake in $ 1 billion at the box office.
As reported by Video Games Chronicle, this news comes as Deadline reports that the movie has grossed $678 million worldwide.
$330 million of that was made outside America, and that number is expected to rise as it continues to premiere in different countries and regions throughout April and May. It won’t even be releasing in Japan until April 28, 2023. As you may imagine, expectations are high for its performance in its own home country.
Lest we forget, it had already took the crown of most successful video game movie of all time over the weekend. Pokemon: Detective Pikachu’s total of $449,762,638 and the Warcraft movie’s $439,048,914 have both been clearly outpaced over the weekend and then some.
As our Todd Black had noted last week, people were already making projections that The Super Mario Bros Movie would be in range of hitting that $ 1 billion mark.
But now, it seems more likely to happen than it did last week, and that’s not just because it’s still making money.
There was a noticeable drop in ticket sales from launch to last week, but it was only down by 28 %. That means there is still a lot of demand for the film, and it may continue to see those high numbers maintained in the US, not even for this week, but for the next coming weeks.
That may seem like an exaggeration, but it seems that a large number of the ticket sales is actually coming from repeat viewings. Since The Super Mario Bros Movie is a proven crowd-pleaser, it would be a certainty that there are hardcore Nintendo fans rewatching the movie, but is it possible that families are returning to watch the movie as well?
While there are certainly gimmicks like IMAX 3D to prompt people to come back, there’s also the Easter eggs that could be getting people to come back.
You expect to see a flood of references to Mario games of course. There are quite a few that were not directly part of the story and so were less obvious than others.
But there were also references to other video games. I won’t namedrop them here, but at least one of them isn’t even made by Nintendo.
So there you go. Even this article has dropped a reason for you to rewatch The Super Mario Bros Movie, or watch it for the first time, if you still haven’t.
