‘The Super Mario Bros. Movie’ Topping Massive $830+ Million Box Office

Universal’s The Super Mario Bros. Movie will top a massive $830+ million at the worldwide box office this weekend, after a huge opening weekend and impressive second weekend that both exceeded expectations. It now seems certain the Nintendo video game adaptation will hit $1 billion as a top contender for highest-grossing film of 2023 by year’s end.

By end of business Sunday, The Super Mario Bros. Movie will sit atop a pile of coins close to double the global gross of 2023’s next-highest grossing film, Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, which performed fine but underwhelming with $474 million in ticket sales (despite being great fun and worth seeing).

Only a handful of movies this year appear to be serious contenders for status as the biggest grosser. Fast X arrives May 19th, followed by The Little Mermaid on May 26th and The Flash on June 16th. The Marvels is next up on November 10th, and then comes Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom.

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After this weekend’s enormous haul, The Super Mario Bros. Movie will have another full week and a half mostly to itself at the box office, with only a few relatively smaller films vying for audience attention and allowing the video game adaptation to keep racking up box office points.

From there, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 arrives May 5th (and I’ll have full coverage of the release, box office opening, and full review coming next week, dear readers, so be sure to watch this space for it all soon) and will take control of the box office to kick off the summer movie season for Marvel Studios.

By that time, though, The Super Mario Bros. Movie will be well north of $900+ million and on the straightaway toward the $1+ billion waiting at the finish line.

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We need to see if Mario Bros. once again shocks us with a big overperformance this weekend, and how strong the weekday holds are in international markets, but at this point $1 billion looks like an easy call and the only question is whether that’s closer to an end results or something it achieves while there’s still plenty more weekends of play to further boost its prospects for challenging for the 2023 box office crown.

Depending on whether you consider Jon Favreau’s 2019 mostly-CGI remake of The Lion King an animated movie, or prefer to point to Frozen II as the highest-grossing animated movie, the threshold for that particular box office record is either $1.65 billion or $1.45 billion, respectively. And I don’t see any scenario where Mario Bros. has a chance at those sorts of box office numbers.

So for now, The Super Mario Bros. Movie will have to content itself with having the biggest animated opening weekend and becoming the highest-grossing film of 2023 shortly after opening, and having a shot at remaining the year’s top-grossing release. Which is no small set of accomplishments, obviously, and even if it winds up short of the ticket sales needed to claim the top seat on the charts this year, it will inevitably be among 2023’s top 10 highest earners, and probably one of the five-highest grossers.

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Also worth noting is the fact Avatar: The Way of Water is the film with the highest global box office gross during the 2023 calendar year thus far, if we expand the data beyond films that released during 2023. During it’s breathtaking historic box office run, the film has taken more than $935 million in worldwide receipts since January 1st of this year, making it easily the current 2023 champ.

Will The Super Mario Bros. Movie be the first film to beat James Cameron’s all-time box office champ’s 2023 portion of its $2.3+ billion total? With such a huge lead, I think Mario Bros. will definitely reach that threshold sooner than any other contenders have a chance.

It’s also possible (probable, perhaps, at this point?) The Super Mario Bros. Movie will wind up the highest grossing animated feature of the year, depending on how Pixar’s Elemental and Disney’s Wish perform. Both of the latter studios’ animated releases have scored lower box office in recent years when not tied to a pre-existing blockbuster franchise like Frozen or Toy Story. My guess at this point, though, is Mario Bros. will hold on to this year’s box office crown in the animated division.

Be sure to check back here again soon, dear readers, for more of my coverage of The Super Mario Bros. Movie, as well as more movie reviews, box office updates, and other analysis.