'Super Mario' Holds on to Box Office Supremacy

The animated hit The Super Mario Bros. Movie enjoyed one final weekend atop the box office charts this week, ahead of next week's release of the next Marvel movie, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3. Mario is the biggest movie of 2023 so far, but it will face real competion from Guardians, which will try to buck the developing trend of decreased interest in super hero movies. Outside of this battle, movies that aren't animated or based on a comic book continue to struggle in theaters. Read on for details.

Via Deadline.

Two holdovers, Super Mario Bros Movie and Evil Dead Rise, are continuing to have a gravitational pull on the under-25 set, while frosh wide releases once again this spring are seeing single-digit million results.

Illumination/Nintendo/Universal’s Super Mario Bros at $40M continues to break records, with the best fourth weekend ever for an animated movie, beating Incredibles 2‘s $28.4M. It’s also the best fourth frame for a Universal title, easily beating Jurassic World‘s $29.2M. It’s even ahead of Spider-Man: No Way Home‘s fourth weekend, which did $32.1M. Domestic running cume by today rises to $490M. As Nancy reported yesterday, the pic is crossing $1 billion today, the fifth movie to do so in the pandemic era, and the third-highest grossing Illumination animated title after Minions and Despicable Me 3.

Now, New Line’s Evil Dead Rise -- the young-ins love this movie so much, it’s only easing 50% to $12.2M. (Smile, by the way, had an amazing second weekend hold of -18%. But -45% for a horror movie is also something to brag about). That second weekend decline is better than that of the 2013 Fede Alvarez remake, which was -63%. By EOD Sunday, this latest version of the Sam Raimi franchise will be pacing ahead of the Alvarez edition by 9.8% with $44.4M.

All of this is flying over the heads of Lionsgate’s feature adaptation of Judy Blume’s Are You There God? It’s Me Margaret ($6.8M) in third, the same studio’s limited release of Finnish genre pic Sisu ($3.25M) in 10th place, and Sony/Affirm’s Big George Foreman: The Miraculous Story of the Once and Future Heavyweight Champion of the World ($3M) in 11th.

Further answering exhibitors’ demand for product is Disney, with the 40th anniversary reissue of Star Wars: Return of the Jedi, which is gravy for the Mouse House at $4.7M in 4th place at 475 theaters and a fantastic $10,3K per screen.

Diving into the numbers this AM, oy, Margaret. Despite excellent reviews at 99%, an A CinemaScore, and great PostTrak of 4 1/2 stars and 88% positive, there’s no urgency for the first big screen take of a Judy Blume novel. Those few who came out and gave the picture great exits were the noisiest on social, but at a low wattage, as the pic only had a social media reach of 66.1M across TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, per RelishMix. You can’t say that there’s no place for female- skewing movies based on bestsellers: Sony’s Where the Crawdads Sing, in the midst of a very competitive summer, busted through with a $17.2M opening, $90.2M stateside take, and near $75M in profit -- and that was off bad reviews! Then there was Lionsgate’s Five Feet Apart (released in 2019), which opened to $13.1M off bad reviews and legged out to just over $45M. But Crawdads was a four-year-old bestseller, and Five Feet Apart just a year old before going theatrical. They weren’t 53-year-old properties like Margaret.

Get the rest of the story at Deadline.