The Super Mario Bros. Movie will make video game adaptation history

Andrew Korpan, ClutchPoints Writer
April 13, 2023

The Super Mario Bros. Movie has barely been out a full week and is just breaking records left, right, and center. The film has reached a couple of major milestones thus far into its short stint in theaters and is poised to break some other ones very, very soon.

First, Super Mario Bros. has already topped the domestic box office for 2023 with its $240,201,260 (and counting) haul — overtaking Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania ($212,812,419). To be fair, Avatar: The Way of Water technically still reigns supreme in terms of domestic grosses in the year 2023 with $281,736,678, but is taken out of consideration since it was released in December 2022.

On the global front, Super Mario Bros. still trails Quantumania $474,161,412 to $427,851,677, but if its popularity this soon into its theatrical run is any indicator, it will likely overtake that sooner than later. Quantumania was released on February 15 of this year and its theatrical run is all but over for the most part (it was only playing in 520 theaters last weekend) with the film gearing up for a digital release next week.

In terms of video game adaptations, Super Mario Bros. is definitely one of the better ones — not that the bar is very high — but it’s also looking to cement its legacy among the box office success. Warcraft (2016) currently holds the top spot amongst video game movies with $439,048,914 worldwide (only $47.3 million of that comes from the U.S.) but Super Mario Bros. is right behind with $427,851,677. It would take nothing short of a catastrophic event like every theater in the world shutting down for the next week or everyone joining John Leguizamo’s boycott to delay the inevitable takeover, so congratulations to Illumination and Universal (who also distributed Warcraft in the U.S.).

While Super Mario Bros. has been far from a critical success, its critics’ score on Rotten Tomatoes is currently at 57% while its audience score is an amazing 96%, the film clearly has captured the attention of children and families alike and appeals to all four quadrants. Like it or not, the box office is Mario’s world for now, and we’re just living in it.