Super Mario Bros Movie brings family box office roaring back

NEW YORK – Movie theatres have struggled to recover from the pandemic in part because the once-reliable family audience has wandered. In 2022, family-oriented films – largely animation – represented 17 per cent of worldwide ticket sales, about half of what they were in 2019.

Over the weekend, however,

The Super Mario Bros Movie from Universal Pictures

turned out families on a jaw-dropping scale, generating an estimated US$146.4 million (S$194.7 million) in ticket sales at theatres in the United States and Canada, for a total of US$204.6 million since arriving Wednesday. The PG-rated movie cost Illumination Entertainment and Nintendo roughly US$100 million to make.

The Super Mario Bros Movie, about Brooklyn plumbers who get zapped into a magical and treacherous realm known as the Mushroom Kingdom, collected an additional US$173 million overseas – a result that one Hollywood trade news site called “plumb insane”, noting that it was on a par with results for Universal mega-franchises such as Fast And Furious (2001 to present) and Jurassic World (2015).

Are family movies back – all the way back to the degree that Hollywood can once again count on them as relatively sure things?

Studio executives and movie theatre owners were practically doing cartwheels over the weekend while shouting: “Yes.”

“This is just extraordinary,” Mr Jim Orr, Universal’s president of domestic theatrical distribution, said on Sunday. “The numbers just kept growing and growing as the weekend went on.”

Box-office analysts were more cautious. As the dominant provider of family entertainment, Walt Disney Studios needs to deliver a theatrical animated hit before a true recovery can be declared, said Mr David Gross, a film consultant and box-office authority.

The past five animated movies that Disney has released in theatres have been ticket-selling disappointments: Strange World and Lightyear in 2022; and Encanto, Raya And The Last Dragon and Ron’s Gone Wrong in 2021, a pandemic-impacted year.

“Still some question marks hanging around family movies,” Mr Gross said in an e-mail. Disney has two animated movies coming up: Elemental, set in a world where residents are made of fire, water, earth and air, arrives in June; and Wish, a musical about a young girl and a star that falls from the sky, is due in November.

Taking the children to the movies can be expensive – as much as US$110 for a family of four in New York City, and that is without popcorn (US$9.29 for a small) or a single soda (US$7).

Families also became accustomed to watching new animated movies at home during the pandemic, when Disney debuted Pixar films such as Luca, Turning Red and Soul on its streaming service, bypassing theatres completely. Streaming-service movies are “free”, or so it can seem for anyone who already subscribes to Disney+ (US$8 a month for the basic version in the US, and S$11.98 a month in Singapore).

For the weekend in North America, The Super Mario Bros Movie was easily No. 1. Second place was a photo finish, with John Wick: Chapter 4 (Lionsgate), Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves (Paramount) and Air (Amazon) each estimated to have collected about US$14 million.

Air, directed by actor Ben Affleck,

collected roughly US$20 million since arriving on Wednesday on 3,500 domestic movie screens, a total that Mr Gross called “excellent”. He noted that sports dramas – Air is about Nike’s efforts in the 1980s to lure a young Michael Jordan to its struggling basketball brand – tended to arrive to about US$5.4 million in ticket sales.

The turnout for Air validated Amazon’s decision to release the well-reviewed film in theatres, where it will play exclusively for at least a month before becoming available on the company’s Prime Video streaming service.

For deep-pocketed Amazon, the theatrical release is something of a loss leader – a way for Prime Video to compete for top talent, who want their films seen on big screens. Analysts estimated that Amazon paid US$130 million for the rights to Air and spent an additional US$50 million on marketing.

Air is the first movie from Artists Equity, a production company formed by Affleck, Matt Damon and RedBird Capital.

But the weekend belonged to The Super Mario Bros Movie. Among certain demographics, the film felt like a cultural event, or what Mr Gross called “moviegoing urgency in action”.

That was no accident: Marketers at Universal carpet bombed televised sporting events (March Madness, NFL championship games, the NBA All-Star Game, the Super Bowl) with promotions and orchestrated a stunt on The Tonight Show in which members of the movie’s voice cast (Chris Pratt, Anya Taylor-Joy, Keegan-Michael Key) sang the Mario theme song.

Universal’s theme parks around the world helped stoke the fire. Universal Studios Hollywood recently opened Super Nintendo World, a lavishly themed expansion that features Mario and his brother. The attraction has been a runaway success, with early-entry tickets sold out every day since it opened on Feb 17.

Mr Paul Dergarabedian, a senior Comscore analyst, said that The Super Mario Bros Movie delivered the biggest opening on record for an animated film that is not a sequel, dethroning The Secret Life Of Pets (2016), and the second-biggest opening on record for an animated movie. Incredibles 2 (Disney-Pixar) ranks as No. 1, having collected US$183 million over its first three days in 2018.

Universal has transformed itself into an animation superpower under the leadership of its chair, Ms Donna Langley. She oversees two cartoon factories: Illumination, founded by Mr Chris Meledandri (Despicable Me, Ice Age), and DreamWorks Animation, which made Puss in Boots: The Last Wish (2022), an Oscar-nominated sequel that arrived to a paltry US$12.4 million in ticket sales in December and ultimately collected US$480 million worldwide.

Universal’s upcoming animated films include Strays, an R-rated canine comedy scheduled for theatrical release in June. The studio is also working to reboot the Shrek franchise.

The Super Mario Bros Movie received mixed to negative reviews. But its instant success among ticket buyers – who gave the film an A grade in CinemaScore exit polls – adds to a recent trend in Hollywood: Studios, scrounging for established, globally appealing intellectual property, seem to have finally cracked the code on adapting video games for the big screen.

The movie industry’s troubled history with the genre started 30 years ago, when the first video game-based movie, Super Mario Bros, became a hall-of-fame misfire. In recent years, studios have become newly enamoured of game adaptations, leading to successes such as Sonic The Hedgehog (Paramount) and Pokemon Detective Pikachu (Warner Bros). On television, The Last Of Us (HBO) and The Witcher (Netflix) are game-based hits.

Mr Orr said that The Super Mario Bros Movie, which played in 3,343 theatres in the United States and Canada, benefited from nostalgia. Nintendo first introduced its Mario Bros games in the 1980s. About 26 per cent of the weekend audience was older than 35.

“Illumination and Nintendo collaborated to make a movie that fans love,” Mr Orr said. “People wanted to come out and be fully entertained by these characters they have known for decades.” NYTIMES