Weekend projections: strong hold for Mario as it barrels towards $350 million

April 16, 2023

Super Mario Bros. The Movie The Super Mario Bros. Movie will have one of the best second-weekend holds of 2023 so far, adding $87 million to its domestic box office tally and another $94.1 million internationally, to end the weekend with around $347.8 million at home and $678 million worldwide. That makes it the top-grossing film of 2023 in North America and neck-and-neck with Chinese film Full River Red for top spot worldwide after just 12 days in release.

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



Mario is coming in far ahead of our model’s prediction, which was based on the typical performance of blockbuster releases in the post-pandemic era. To get an idea of how it’s doing, here are the best 2nd-weekend holds of 2023 (clicking on the chart will bring the full list of all second weekends for wide releases):



While it hasn’t had the best hold among all films, it’s doing terrific business compared to most. Really the only other film that had a breakout first weekend this year and a good hold on its second weekend is M3GAN, which dropped 40% on its sophomore outing. Super Mario Bros. could well beat that number when we get final figures tomorrow.

Mario’s continued bumper numbers came partly at the expense of its competitors, almost all of which are falling short of our Friday-morning prediction. The Pope’s Exorcist is doing best among them with its $9.15 million, which is just 7% short of what the model expected. Renfield is running out of steam a bit as the weekend goes on, but is doing respectable business for a black comedy.

The remaining new wide releases are all coming in substantially below the model’s prediction, which is almost certainly due to the amount of competition. The only new wide release that can be said to have really flopped this weekend is Sweetwater, which missed out on a top 10 spot with $350,000 from 1,204 theaters. The other five wide debutants can all claim to have done fairly well given how crowded the market is right now.

Also worth noting is the $320,396 projected opening weekend for Beau is Afraid, which is playing in just four theaters this weekend. At $80,099, that will give it easily the best theater average of 2023, and the second-best average of the post-pandemic era, just short of Licorice Pizza, which averaged $86,289 on its opening weekend.

Overall, we’re looking at another weekend well over $100 million for the market as a whole. That’s the ninth time we’ve hit that figure out of sixteen weekends so far in 2023. This time last year, that figure stood at four. In 2019, fourteen of the first sixteen weekends topped $100 million, so we’ve still got a way to go, but having a lot of new films in theaters is helping the market return to something close to “normal” at last.

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

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Bruce Nash,