Weekend projections: Mario storms past $200 million in monster 5-day opening

April 9, 2023

Universal upped their projection for The Super Mario Bros. Movie’s Friday-to-Sunday earnings to $146.36 million on Sunday morning, which will be enough to take it well past $200 million over its five-day opening weekend. Needless to say, it’s breaking a lot of records this weekend, but its most remarkable feat is probably that it’s already the all-time top-grossing movie based on a game in North America.

Here’s how the domestic numbers look as of Sunday morning (click on the image for the full chart of films reporting so far)…

As I conjectured in Friday’s prediction column, Universal was lowballing their weekend projection slightly, and Mario will come in almost $10 million better than expected. Its “A” CinemaScore means it will have been getting good word of mouth, and Easter weekend will have done it good.

What made the film somewhat hard to predict was its Wednesday opening. There are a few films that opened with over $30 million on Wednesday, but none that did that and topped $50 million on Friday, so Mario went into the weekend already in uncharted territory. Specifically among game adaptations, its domestic opening 3-day weekend is not only the biggest of all time, it’s also more than twice what Sonic the Hedgehog 2 made on its opening weekend ($72.1 million).

One record it won’t break is the best Easter weekend, but that’s probably because of its Wednesday debut. The current holder of that record, Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice made $166 million over the three-day weekend, and it’s reasonable to assume Mario would have topped that number if it had opened on Friday.

One record Super Mario Bros. has yet to take is the top-grossing movie based on a game worldwide. That record, surprisingly, belongs to Warcraft, which is widely regarded as a flop, but was helped to a respectable global total by earning over $200 million in China. It won’t remain top of that chart for long.

Although it’s being completely overshadowed, AIR is posting good numbers this weekend too, with a projected $14.4 million 3-day opening and over $20 million over five days. It’s in a very close three-way battle for second place with John Wick: Chapter 4 ($14.6 million projected), and Dungeons & Dragons, which is down a sharp 61% this weekend. I suspect D&D’s drop is largely due to fairly direct competition with Mario.

Other notable performances this weekend include the faith-based film His Only Son, which will pick up another $3.25 million to top $11 million by the end of the weekend, and Paint, which will crack the top 10 with $750,000 for IFC Films.

- Studio weekend projections
- All-time top-grossing movies in North America
- All-time top-grossing movies worldwide

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Bruce Nash, bruce.nash@the-numbers.com