The Super Mario Bros. Movie, from Illumination/Universal, had a spectacular weekend at the box office, earning a staggering $146.36 million domestically over the course of the three days and a record $204.6 million over the course of its first five days, according to reports. For comparison, Illumination’s previous biggest opening was Minions from 2015, which brought in $115 million domestically on its way to a $336 million domestic and $1.157 billion global total.
With a whopping $377 million worldwide, the film broke the record for the greatest animated film opening, previously held by Disney‘s Frozen II ($358.5 million) in 2019.
Mario had the highest opening for an animated movie ever with a global total of $21.6M and a 15% share of its revenue coming from Imax. It will be interesting to see how this one performs in the coming weeks given its A CinemaScore, especially given the lack of any other family-friendly movies to compete with Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 on May 5.
Matt Damon’s performance in Ben Affleck’s Air, which earned $20.2M domestically in its opening weekend, demonstrated that people still flock to the movies in spite of the economy.
Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves, on the other hand, made $14.5M in its second weekend, a 61% decrease (which is unfortunate considering it’s a lot of fun) that pushed its domestic total to $61.1M. John Wick: Chapter 4 moved up to No. 2 with an additional $14.6M (-48%) to bring its three-week total to $147M. Less than $25 million and about $60 million, respectively, separate the Keanu Reeves action film from Chapter 3’s domestic total ($171 million) and global total ($327 million).
