Mario is no longer the highest grossing movie of the year
Take a wild guess which movie surpassed The Super Mario Bros. Movie at the domestic box office
Aux News Mario
You had a good run, Super Mario Bros. Movie, but we all knew this moment was coming. That’s right, Chris Pratt’s Mario is no longer the biggest beloved children’s IP film on the block. The crown has obviously been passed to Barbie, the biggest cinematic sensation of the year (and perhaps most years in recent memory). Per Variety, Greta Gerwig’s girlhood opus has officially generated $575.4 million in North America, surpassing Mario’s flat $574 mil. With a haul of $1.3 billion globally, the film is on track to overcome Mario’s $1.35 billion worldwide gross, as well.
Becoming the biggest film of 2023 is just another feather in the cap for the Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling-led comedy. Barbie scored the best debut of the year, the biggest opening weekend for a female director ever, and the highest-grossing movie directed solely by a woman (via Variety). Warner Bros. Discovery has made the puzzling decision to offer Barbie streaming on demand starting September 5, despite the fact that it still has momentum in theaters. But a newly announced IMAX run (and probably an awards run near Oscars time) will no doubt boost Barbie up the rankings even further; right now it’s the 14th-biggest domestic release and 20th-biggest global release of all time, and it still has room to grow.
For those interested, the Oppenheimer half of summer’s favorite double feature is still doing tidy numbers, too. Christopher Nolan’s historical epic has taken home $700 million globally, making it the fourth-highest-grossing movie of 2023 and the fifth-biggest R-rated movie of all time, behind The Matrix Reloaded ($738 million), Deadpool ($781 million), Deadpool 2 ($786 million) and Joker ($1.066 billion), per Collider. This summer at the movies, everybody wins!
32 Comments
Barbie was actually good. Mario was passable and I think given more leeway given how past video game movies have been/how bad the other Mario movie is.
By Illumination standards it’s pretty good. Compared to other recent kids movies it’s also pretty good. It’s accessible for young kids and doesn’t do anything stupid. Like, I’ve seen some BAD Illumination movies and this certainly isn’t one of them.Especially since, at least for now, they didn’t try to make this movie have an equivalent to the Minions.
One review (I think it was the New York Times) said that the remarkable thing about Barbie is how it feels like a person made it.
yes, lots of Gerwig’s DNA in Barbie. I have no idea who made Mario, which was fine, but for such an imaginative game I wish it did more.
I feel like a straight adaptation of Mario 3 would be a godsend. “And then Mario turned into a raccoon, and then he turned into a frog, and then he turned into a raccoon again, and the raccoon turned into a statue.”
Point of order, he changed into a tanooki, and I doubt Nintendo will have the…balls…to portray him accurately:
“take a guess” but also it’s the header image so…
Also fairly sure the headline was being sarcastic
Are you familiar with the concept of sarcasm?
I can’t imagine any other film this year topping it, either. Not unless people really show up for Aquaman 2 (good chance it does quite well in the Chinese market because big-budget action movie + water setting = big Chinese box office). Even then, it would have to do better than the first one.
But on the other hand, by the time it comes out, it will have been close to a month since the last big-budget movie to come out in theaters, and has no competition for the rest of the month (Zach Snyder’s R-Rated Star Wars Rebel Moon comes out on Netflix).
i think, assuming the strike gets resolved in time and allows the mega-stars to promote it, dune 2 could be huge. more than 1.4 billion huge? i doubt it, but i think it’ll be the last big hit.aquaman 2…man, i don’t know! i can’t believe there isn’t even a trailer yet. china has definitely pulled back on supporting american movies overall (obviously avatar was an exception…but it was an exception to everything), so i don’t even think you can count on that. sure, the last one did 300 million there, but that was also 5 years ago. black panther made 100 million and black panther 2 did 15 million.
I’m hoping for the best for Dune Part 2, but I’d be pleasantly surprised if it makes more than $600 million. That would be a real success, too, if they didn’t blow out the budget too much on Part 2 (the first Dune managed to pull $402 million against $165 million budget in 2021, which isn’t a huge hit but is genuinely impressive given that theaters worldwide were still in recovery).
china has definitely pulled back on supporting american movies overall
(obviously avatar was an exception…but it was an exception to
everything), so i don’t even think you can count on that. sure, the last
one did 300 million there, but that was also 5 years ago. black panther made 100 million and black panther 2 did 15 million.
Something about big-budget movies involving water really seems to turn out the audience in China, though. Meg 2 was not a huge worldwide hit ($300 million versus $130 million budget), but it cleared over $100 million in China alone.
They just announced that Dune 2 is being pushed back to March.
Saw that! Huge bummer, especially since it had that great IMAX window in November.
yeah they heard us talking about it. anyway, to your point about the meg 2 i will say that was also largely co-financed by china (i think as much as half?) and they probably get an entirely different cut. it was very obvious when i was watching how much of it was shot in a way that dubbing could be implemented (and how much of it was possibly dubbed in english). that was why i brought up black panther 2, because it also has water and bombed there haha.
There’s no way Dune 2 becomes the biggest hit of 2023 because it’s a 2024 movie.
I mean , I know Barbie was good and all , but imagine telling a time traveller from 1990 that “the biggest movie of the year was based on Barbie , and it beat out the Super Mario animated movie for box office gross, and that is not even REMOTELY the weirdest thing about the future world ”.
1990 guy: Wow, crazy. But I’m sure nothing can top the massive box office frenzy I saw last year, when Michael Keaton played Batman. I mean, that was an unprecedented cultural event.Modern guy: Yeah, they brought Keaton Batman back last month and nobody cared.
I mean after multiple Keaton’s in Multiplicity , where even the ‘didn’t bake him in the oven long enough’ Keaton who was a little bit mentally deficient got to have sexy times with Keaton Primes wife …well we we’d crossed the Keaton Rubicon there …
I cared about Keaton coming back. I didn’t care about the rest of the movie around him.
Look, the only way I’d give a shit about Affleck Batman is if he were still playing Batman, but with Matt Damon as Robin, Jason Lee as Gordon, and Alan Rickman as Alfred – and, of course, written and directed by Kevin Smith.
Would Alanis Morissette be the Joker or Darkseid in that version?
Jeff Anderson as Joker. Alanis as Poison Ivy. Salma Hayek is Catwoman. I just wanna see Damon point to Affleck that the goon he just threw off a third floor balcony counts as murder. Maybe point out that if he used his billions to eliminate social problems and better directly improve the lives of the poor in Gotham he wouldn’t have to throw these victims of society off balconies. It’s better than anything DC has done film-wise with Batman since Nolan. Fuck it, obviously grymmedarke ain’t working.
“I just wanna see Damon point to Affleck that the goon he just threw off a third floor balcony counts as murder. Maybe point out that if he used his billions to eliminate social problems and better directly improve the lives of the poor in Gotham he wouldn’t have to throw these victims of society off balconies.”I just read this in Matt Damon’s Loki voice. I’m so down for this version of Batman. and I’m sure well be safe from mechanical spiders on this one.
I mean would that be before or after you broke the news about all the terrible Star Wars movies, or the fact that there are over 20 marvel movies in a shared universe or how they managed to fuck up DC so bad that a Justice League movie came out twice and still have mostly been memory holed. Also maybe warn about internet, social media and, if you have the time, stop 9/11
“And who is this Elon Musk that I keep hearing people talk about?”“I’m going to do you a favour and spare you the burden of that knowledge.”
“Who, the real estate guy up in New York? What does he do? Wait, WHAT?”
I’ll admit I was a huge Barbie skeptic, so this is just wild to me. I thought the movie would be lucky to get $500m. Someone here suggested it could be a Mario level hit and I wouldn’t be surprised if they audibly heard me scoff at the very idea. Shows what I know.
What’s even more incredible though is that Barbie is tracking way ahead of Top Gun: Maverick, and has at least comparable legs. TG:M ran for an absolutely insane amount of time (Like 4 months on over 2000 screens, and then another few months to boot), and there’s really no good reason for theaters to not allow Barbie to do the same thing. It’s currently only $200m away, and it’s perfectly possible that it could bridge that gap given enough time, especially with the IMAX release. Hell, it might even end up topping Avatar, domestically at least.
It looks like the gap between TG:M and Barbie is slowly closing. I don’t think Barbie has the legs to catch Maverick. (graph from the-numbers.com) I did a whole project for my College Algebra students about using linear modeling to predict future box office of movies. My prediction is that Barbie will top out at around $640 million dollars domestically.(I made a YouTube video about it, but that only got 16 seconds of total watch time. I’m going to rerelease it on Tuesday.)
I am now extra saddened that Tom Breihan isn’t doing Popcorn Champs here anymore. I would LOVE to get to read his entry on Barbie at the end of the year.
Somewhere out there Ben Shapiro is very sad right now, and that thought heartens me.
The free market has spoken, and it totally loves the “woke feminist agenda.” What’s he gonna do? Speak ill of capitalism?