The Super Mario Bros. Movie stomps on the competition at the weekend box office
$200 million is a lot of coins to knock out of a Question Mark Block
Aux News Mario
It’s a veritable Super Smash Bros. at the U.S. box office this weekend, with Super Mario battling John Wick and Edgin Darvis and Michael Jordan’s mom Deloris and Ghostface (Final Destination, no items), but only one could come out on top: The Super Mario Bros. Movie, which opened to $146 million this weekend. Combined with the good money it made across the end of last week, and it already has over $200 million. That’s some serious wahooo as Mario would say, and it seems like plenty of people said let’s-a go to the theaters this weekend for Mario time.
First place was obviously going to go to Mario, even if it had been unbearably bad, but second, third, and fourth this week were some real battles—and proof that you should never, ever bet against the Baba Yaga. John Wick: Chapter 4 made $14.6 million (for a total of $147 million after three weeks), thoroughly trouncing Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves, which made only $14.5 million (for a total of $62 million after two weeks). Fourth place went to Nike drama Air, which made a pitiful $14.4 million in its debut weekend, and then there’s an actual big jump down to fifth place for Scream VI with $3 million.
The second half of the top 10 covers His Only Son, Creed III, Shazam! Fury Of The Gods (which, by the way, is at $56 million after four weeks), Owen Wilson’s Paint in a limited release, and A Thousand And One also in a limited release. Hey, all of the theaters around the country are showing Super Mario. Better that than another forgettable Marvel movie, right?
The full top 10, courtesy of Box Office Mojo, is below.
- The Super Mario Bros. Movie
- John Wick: Chapter 4
- Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves
- Air
- Scream VI
- His Only Son
- Creed III
- Shazam! Fury Of The Gods
- Paint
- A Thousand And One
29 Comments
BUT UH OHEMJI!!! THE AVC INSISTS HES TEH WORSE CRIS!!!’nTruly shocked they a competent rendition of a beloved corporate property did well!
box office success != critical success
Just taking the piss on the Chris Pratt discourse, haha.The pearl-clutching at the idea that Emmett from the Lego Movie would voice Mario was so dumb, and so funny.
No one wants to support Fury of False Gods.
Don’t know what the forgettable Marvel movie is but I’ve heard nothing but negative reviews about SMB – absence of plot and motivation, any kind of dynamics. One reviewer thought the sound direction was ok but found the 80s tunes annoying and misplaced. The voicing sounded unninspired, even phoned-in (Taylor-Joy). But kids just want to see big things moving around the screen, I guess.
I have some friends who have seen it with their kids and all of them said it was perfectly fine and enjoyed it while their kids loved it.
This was my reaction: I mostly had a good time and my kids thought it was the greatest movie they’d ever seen. So, a success I’d say.
I just got back from seeing it. The assessment you quote is correct; SMB is brightly-colored noise, an extruded movie-shaped product designed to entertain six-year-olds. There’s really nothing here for any adult with a modicum of critical discernment aside from the suicidal, nihilistic Lumalee (I’m not kidding) who’s imprisoned alongside Luigi in Bowser’s fortress.The main characters don’t have arcs so much as lines (Luigi is a coward the entire movie, except at the clutch moment at the climax when he’s suddenly… not). Actually, no one beyond Mario and Luigi has any kind of character development at all, unless you count Bowser: He wants to marry Peach, and when she finally turns him down, he more or less shrugs and immediately attempts to commit genocide against the Mushroom Kingdom.
I’m not one to scoff at mass-marketed pabulum forms of entertainment all that much (I love me some Marvel movies, after all), but if I was going to, this would be the movie I’d hold up as Exhibit A for How To Dumb Down Society.
Sorry your money was wasted.
AVClub should just save some dollars and post your review. Very nice.
Unfortunately, his review seemed sincere and did not contain any forced, awkward snark. So he’s never getting a job here.
Money spent: $0. (Well, $1 for parking.) I have an annual pass at the local theater which gets me one free ticket per day. I wouldn’t have bothered seeing this otherwise.
So, in other words, it’s like any Super Mario Bros. game outside of the RPGs. It wasn’t made to be a character study. It was meant to trade on nostalgia for the adults and bright and color action for the kids. It works on both levels. If you went in expecting an Oscar nominated Pixar movie, you didn’t have the right expectations.
“It was meant to trade on nostalgia for the adults and bright and color action for the kids”Sounds like lazy shit, don’t think there’s anything wrong with pointing that out just because you expected it beforehand.
You’re a vocal representative of the Dumbed Down Society. Ok.
In 2023 I’d wish we could do better than the tired and harmful trope of a princesses forced marriage or genocide if she says no. Children don’t need more toxic masculinity. A better story would have been Princess is a badass (true to her character in SM2 and MKart) so Bowser has to trap her and lock her up so he can do his bad deeds. But Mario saves her and they stop him. The 80s misfitting music, the lumalee and destruction of NYC streets which gave me 9/11 reminders were also hard to take in. But my 4yr old loved it.
There’s an excellent piece here from the Guardian about the pitfalls of hiring VAs for brand recognition over talent: https://www.theguardian.com/film/2023/apr/06/super-mario-bros-movie-voice-actors-animationA lot of whole-body actors don’t work well when they only get to use their voice. Otherwise, you need to have a really, really good VA director to help them get a good performance – something Disney’s pretty good at, hence all those “But James Woods/Tom Hanks/Robin Williams sounded good!” counterpoints. Disney can and will go hard on them in the booth, though I suspect you wouldn’t need to either for those guys – but for guys like Pratt and Taylor Joy? They obviously need, at least, better direction.Granted, I don’t watch a lot of animated movies, but I’m reminded of several big-name actors shoehorned into videogames for the recognition who absolutely tried their best but couldn’t, for the life of them, work out just what the hell the devs were getting at. And they ended up sound flat, out of context with the rest of the world. Sean Bean in TES IV – tried his damnedest, sounded weird in the context he was put in. Same with Liam Neeson in Fallout 3. And Jesus Christ, you could hear the dial tone on Martin Sheen’s lines in Mass Effect 2. You can just tell the directors were absolutely starstruck, or at least apathetic, and couldn’t work up the gumption to give some basic direction.
I thought it was a very charming, fun film – definitely aimed at kids first, but I enjoyed it as an adult. I don’t get the critics talking about a lack of plot or motivation. Both were pretty clear in what they were. It looked really pretty, too, and the voice acting was good – even Pratt’s, which I was skeptical about going in.
By “plot” they mean hamfisted mystery boxing, inversions of tropes that are now ironically their own tropes, and heavy color commentary on social issues of the day.But Plot just means story- exposition, rising action, climax, denouement and resolution. I saw the movie Friday night and the plot was EXTREMELY straightforward: Guys who feel like failures become heroes. It’s not going to win any awards, but the stale adults going to this movie and bloviating about “a modicum of critical thinking” were never the target audience in the first place. It’s like watching a Twilight movie and asking where all the explosions and transforming cars are.
It’s was a perfectly fine kids movie. About as deep as a Minions movie. It’s what I expected and my younger, The Mario fan, loved it. The rest of us in the family were fine with it.
I saw it, liked it a lot. The kids loved it. It’s not a MASTERPIECE but it delivers what it set out to do…a fun, non-threatening and beautiful movie about video game characters. After Puss in Boots I think the bar is pretty high in review-land, but this doesn’t disappoint. 3.5 stars.
So a few weeks ago I guessed that Mario might be one of the only movies of 2023 to possibly reach $1b, and at nearly $400m on opening weekend, it does seem poised to do so. Especially since it doesn’t open in Japan until the end of the month, where it should pull in something north of $75m, I would imagine, probably just enough to cross that line.
was hoping D & D would have better legs. but there is a lot of competition . feels like maybe should’ve been released on a different date, i dunno. otoh maybe plenty were just willing to wait and watch it on streaming in a couple of months
The timing on that definitely felt awful for the US domestic market. They should have released it back in late January, when it would have had no real competition except Avatar 2 on its 5th or 6th weekend (and Ant-Man 3 still 3-4 weeks away). Putting it the weekend before Mario all but ensured it was going to get Murdered by Mario even if it had done really well on the opening weekend. Maybe it was the only time they could get it released in China.
It wasn’t hard to predict that SMB would do huge business since it’s literally the only kids movie to come out since Puss In Boots, which was released over three months ago.
Super Mario Bros deserves it. It’s a fun, charming little film with good voice-acting, good visuals, and a plot and characters that are basically what they need to be. There’s nothing unusual or sophisticated about it, but that’s true of Mario games as well – they’re just “Hero rescues princess from dragon”, which this actually improved upon. I’m really bummed about the D&D movie under-performing. It was always going to get killed on the second weekend by the Mario movie, but it lost to John Wick 4 as well this time and had a 61% drop-off in the second weekend on top of the tepid first weekend. It will linger in theaters until GOTG 3 comes out at the start of May, but if it makes any profit it will be in streaming and video rental sales. It sounds like they’re already pouring cold water on doing sequels (no surprise), and while a limited TV series was greenlit I’ll bet it dies quietly down the line. It’s a real pity, since it was a fun fantasy film that was genuinely quite funny – funnier than I thought it would be. Maybe the “Dungeons & Dragons” element of it turned people off, or bad marketing – those trailers really didn’t do much to sell it.
The marketing is definitely bad. I was going to skip it until a friend who saw it told me it’s a fun family film. I would have passed on it based on the trailers.
I don’t know about “deserve,” but agree that SMB was completely fine. My kids had a blast. Good enough for me.
Saw it today with 3 friends (all late 30s to mid-40s, 2 men, 2 women). We all loved it.It’s entertaining, silly fun, and incredibly funny, plus loaded with old school gaming references.Don’t expect Casablanca or anything, but man, if you’re a fan of the source material, it’s a must-watch, if only for its ability to wash out the bad taste that the ‘90s live-action feature left in everyone’s mouth.
It sure is a kids’ CGI flick that is making a ton of money. Boy howdy.