The movie “Super Mario Bros” on its way to the billion dollar cinema

The two plumber brothers will therefore have done better than the duo of irreducible Gauls on the big screen. Three weeks after its release in French cinemas, the film “Super Mario Bros” crossed the bar of 4.8 million admissions in France and exceeded “Asterix and Obelix: The Middle Empire” (nearly 4.6 million entries). Which already makes it the feature film, released in 2023, with the most admissions in France this year.

“It’s a colossal success and it’s a film that has the potential to make between 5.5 and 5.7 million admissions,” said Eric Marti, CEO of Comscore France. Which would be a performance on the level of ‘Incredibles 2’ or ‘Despicable Me 3’ in terms of animated film. “In the meantime, “Super Mario Bros” has already become the adaptation of a video game license that has attracted the most people in the world at the cinema in France. And by far.

To date, the film has made more than 2 million admissions than “Lara Croft: Tomb Raider” and “Uncharted” (2.5 million each) or “Sonic 2 the Movie” (2.25 million), according to Comscore. The paradigm is the same internationally, where the feature film is close to 900 million dollars in box office receipts and could cross the symbolic billion wall this weekend. Which would be a great first for a video game adaptation. “Super Mario Bros” will also be the very first film of 2023 to p*** this milestone.

“The gl*** ceiling just shattered shutter”

“Since 2016, the record for a film from a video game license was held by ‘Warcraft’, at nearly 440 million. There, the gl*** ceiling has just shattered, explains Eric Marti. They managed to make a film that is faithful to the spirit of the game, while making it accessible to ‘non-gamers’. Afterwards, Super Mario is a character who has been out of the video game world for a long time and is almost part of common language. »

Co-produced by Nintendo and the Illumination Entertainment studio (“Despicable Me”, “The Minions”, etc.) and distributed by Universal Pictures, the feature film would benefit from a production budget [hors marketing et frais de distribution, NDLR] $100 million, thinks he knows “Variety”, and is therefore already largely profitable.

A fundamental trend

“Overall, it should also be noted that in the world’s Top 6 video game adaptations to the cinema, three of them have been released in the last fifteen months with ‘Uncharted’ or ‘Sonic 2, the film’”, explains Eric Marti. A fundamental trend which also concerns the small screen, as illustrated by the XXL success of the series “The Last of Us” on HBO earlier this year.

These successes have not escaped video game publishers or Hollywood producers. “Gran Turismo”, “Ninja Turtles: Teenage Years”, “Sonic 3, the film”, “Ghost of Tsushima” or even “Sifu” from the Parisian studio Sloclap: many adaptations will land in dark rooms in the months and years to come.