‘The Super Mario Bros. Movie’ surpasses $1bn at global box office

The Super Mario Bros. Movie has surpassed the $1billion (£800m) mark at the global box office.

• READ MORE: ‘The Super Mario Bros. Movie’ review: plucky plumbers’ new adventure should have stayed a pipe dream

It hit the ground running with its release last month, and had the biggest opening weekend ever for an animated film at the box office.

Yesterday (April 30), it crossed $1billion and is now the 10th biggest animated film in history globally, beating out the $942.5million (£754million) that Minions: The Rise Of Gru grossed in 2019.

It pulled in $487.5million (£389.8million) in North America alone and a further $533million (£426.6million) internationally.

Only four other movies have achieved this post-pandemic including Spider-Man: No Way Home, Top Gun: Maverick, Jurassic World Dominion and Avatar: The Way Of Water.

It comes after Shigeru Miyamoto – a creator of the Super Mario Bros. franchise – recently said he was grateful for the bad press that the film received, for “contributing to the movie’s notoriety and buzz”.

Miyamoto admitted that the film exceeded all expectations he had, and received a response globally that could only be achieved through “luck”.

“I did have a level of expectations that this movie would also do well [like the Super Nintendo World theme park], but I was very surprised that it went beyond what I could have imagined when it finally came out,” Miyamoto said.

“You need some luck to achieve this level of success for a film,” he added.

In a two-star review, NME described the film as being “hobbled by a perfunctory plot” and falling victim to “some lazy creative choices”.

“Clearly, adapting the best-selling video game franchise of all-time into an equally ingenious movie is a tall order,” it read. “The one previous attempt, a 1993 live-action film starring Bob Hoskins and John Leguizamo, was a box office flop that has since built a bit of a cult following. This one seems destined for the opposite fate: it’s faithful enough to tempt existing fans to the cinema, but too perfunctory to be pored over.”

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