We’ve been counting down the days to report the mammoth milestone, but The Super Mario Bros. Movie has just crossed one billion dollars in worldwide box office ticket sales. This gigantic milestone was reported by Deadline, also sharing that Super Mario Bros. $40 million weekend sales domestically give it the best fourth weekend ever for an animated movie or Universal picture, topping Incredibles 2 and Jurassic World respectively. This is a huge win for both animation studio Illumination, as well as Nintendo, showing the enormous potential of their IP in other media outside gaming.
This new figure also makes The Super Mario Bros. Movie the first animated movie since the pandemic began to join that coveted billion dollar club. There’s still a ways to go if the movie wanted to take a shot at becoming the highest grossing animated movie of all time, as The Lion King‘s 2019 remake sits comfortably atop the list with $1.6 billion worldwide on Wikipedia, or Frozen II with its $1.4 billion global box office via The Numbers, for those who don’t consider the realistic Lion King to be an animated movie. With this momentum though, anything is possible for the legendary Nintendo plumbers.
It seems that box office domination is exactly what Illumination has in mind for the coming months, with the recent reveal that The Super Mario Bros. Movie physical media release date has been delayed by an entire month, pushing the DVD and Blu-Ray releases to July instead of June. The digital release has also been delayed an indefinite amount of time. Illumination are positioning The Super Mario Bros. Movie to be the ruling animated movie of the box office for a while longer, with little competition in the market expected until the release of Pixar’s Elemental in June.
Have you already seen The Super Mario Bros. Movie? What did you think of it? How many kart-loads of cash do you expect the movie to make before it wraps up its theatrical run? Let us know in the comments below, and keep your eyes on GameLuster for more gaming news.
