Shigeru Miyamoto Talks Success of Super Mario Bros Movie

UPDATE

The movie has now crossed $900 million!

ORIGINAL STORY

Many people are still stunned at the success that the Super Mario Bros Movie has had at the global box office. Many felt that because of the popularity of Mario in the gaming and pop culture space, the film could get the “top video game movie” spot. But now, it’s less than $150 million away from getting to the $1 billion mark at the box office! Plus, the movie has yet to release in Japan, and that almost literally guarantees a global total of beyond a billion. But easily, one of the most surprised people was Shigeru Miyamoto.

The creator of Mario, and legendary game designer, has been very vocal about the movie as he was the “liaison” between Nintendo and Illumination when the movie was being made. However, in an interview translated by VGC, he noted that the movie did well beyond what he had hoped:

“I did have a level of expectations that this movie would also do well [like the Super Nintendo World theme park], but I was very surprised that it went beyond what I could have imagined when it finally came out.”

If you recall, the film broke numerous records when it debuted at the box office, including being the biggest animation opening ever on a global scale. Then, it only dropped slightly in the second and third weekend of its run, racking up the global total and securing more records in the process.

One of the biggest hurdles it overcame was that the film didn’t get a positive score from critics. But Shigeru Miyamoto feels that this worked in its favor:

“You need some luck to achieve this level of success for a film,” he noted. “While many foreign critics have given the movie relatively low ratings, I think that also contributed to the movie’s notoriety and buzz.”

That might sound counterintuitive, but that’s not the case. There have been movies that people have gone to see simply because they “want to know how bad it is.” A certain Marvel vampire movie comes to mind on that front.

Other times, people think that critics are “not the right person” to review certain movies, and thus they want to make their own opinions. Finally, some people were going to see the movie because it had Mario in it, so it didn’t matter what critics thought.

One can only imagine Miyamoto’s pride in knowing that the character he created will be a billion-dollar movie star very soon.