The Super Mario Bros. Movie has emerged as the biggest blockbuster of 2023.
As revealed by Deadline, the movie made $ 1.36 billion at the box office. After subtracting costs, it made $ 559 million overall.
The Super Mario Bros. Movie also reached two milestones for its animation studio, Illumination Pictures. That $ 559 million profit puts it past Minions $ 502 million in 2015, as the most profitable film the studio ever made. On the other hand, that $ 1.36 billion box office figure makes it the biggest box office that Illumination ever had.
This result was a real vindication for Nintendo, whose first Mario movie, the live action 1993 film simply called Super Mario Bros, was a famous critical dud, and ultimately a flop. That movie became even more infamous after the fact, because of the notoriously messy production that occurred behind the scenes.
One big difference between those thirty years was in 1993, Nintendo largely allowed producers Lightmotive to do what they wanted. That was a time when Hiroshi Yamauchi was in charge of Nintendo in Japan, and his nephew Minoru Arakawa was in charge of Nintendo of America.
Nintendo was certainly not the only company that didn’t realize they had to protect their IPs integrity in the transition from video game to film, but theirs is one of the most notorious failures as a result.
In 2023, Nintendo Fellow Shigeru Miyamoto was closely involved in the production of The Super Mario Bros. Movie with Illumination Pictures. That meant that he could make sure that the resulting film would be enjoyable for fans, appropriate for kids, and most importantly, not too divergent from the games that he helped design.
As it turned out, Illumination made a slightly different Mario than what we are familiar with from the video games. It really isn’t so much that Chris Pratt was voicing Mario, or that Princess Peach was no longer a damsel in distress.
Really, it was the off model versions of the Mario characters, that got paired with a new narrative that didn’t match the story in any of the video games that made it different. But those changes turned out for the better, as Illumination created more fully fleshed out characters than Miyamoto, Tezuka, and the original EAD team could make in 1985.
Of course, at this point we also ended up with many other different versions of Mario, with their own unique characters and stories. Miyamoto had once stated that Nintendo saw each new Mario game like a different stage production of Mario, instead of a single continuity.
For all those reasons, The Super Mario Bros. Movie fits in perfectly with the Mario non-canon in 2024.
