Most gamers saw it coming from a mile away, but The Super Mario Bros. movie has set records at the box office. This is despite professional movie critics giving it a mid-50s score on Rotten Tomatoes, because only they would expect a substantial plot or storyline from a Mario movie. It’s hard to imagine their shocked Pikachu faces when they find out the Princess has been captured time and time again in the video games. It’s almost as if they didn’t understand why the movie was made in the first place.
According to Deadline, The Super Mario Bros. movie set a new record for biggest opening weekend of an animated film in history at $377.2 million, besting Frozen II’s opening of $358 million in 2019. Domestically, it grossed $204.6 million, giving it the biggest five-day domestic opening in history. That figure beats Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen’s $200 million. Obviously, it’s the biggest opening for a movie based on a video game, beating Sonic the Hedgehog 2’s $72 million over three days.
Clearly, parents weren’t able to tell their kids that they weren’t watching The Super Mario Bros. movie because it’s rated “rotten” on Rotten Tomatoes. The reality is, most parents were excited to take their kids to watch the movie, because it did what it sought out to do: appeal to Mario fans.
Along with HBO’s The Last of Us this year, gamers might finally be able to wash away that terrible taste the Halo TV series left in our mouths last year. Oh wait, we don’t speak about that around here — it’s like that one movie they made, based on a popular Nickelodeon cartoon series that supposedly doesn’t exist.
