DAJK

Mario’s more family-oriented. F&F movies usually don’t have “family movie Saturday bumps” which will offset some of that drop for Mario.

Wait... edibles aren't legal in the States? Obviously not in certain states but I assumed in at least some. There's a reason Universal wanted to release Trolls 2 on April 20

Let's not get too carried away. Don't want to give @CJohn gasoline to burn when this "only" does 175/475.

As long as the songs SOUND the same (that's what people recognize) and have a similar effect in the film, I don't think most people will care outside of outrage crowds on the internet.

Nah. A movie needs to break out from just fans of the IP to truly catch on.

I think people might be jumping the gun with video game adaptations and their box office viability. Sure, they could definitely be hits. But Mario’s performance has less to do with the fact that it’s a video game specifically, and more to do with the fact that Mario is one of the most recognizable characters and IPs to ever exist. Sure, I’m certain there will be sequels, and maybe some other big video game IPs will try their hand, but I’d be shocked if this was the start of a big “video game renaissance” in Hollywood.

Right, but even that's an outlier for the YA book "genre". Catching Fire pretty much stayed flat with the first Hunger Games. Potter 2 and Maze Runner 2 decreased from the first. Divergent decreased. And then even other books that aren't part of the "YA" genre, or considered to be; Narnia decreased, Hobbit decreased, even LOTR didn't see massive increases from the first to the second.

I've been following box office since I was 13 and I still never really understood something, if anyone's able to answer this who may have been older than me/following box office back at the time. Twilight opened to 69M in 2008. Then all of a sudden the sequel comes out a year later and more than doubles its opening weekend. Did the franchise really see that much of a spike in popularity over 12 months? Wouldn't book fans have driven up sales of the first film? Kind of like Hunger Games/Catching Fire, there was a bit of a sequel bump there, but nothing like Twilight. And then every subsequent sequel after New Moon performed pretty much on par with New Moon (both domestic and overseas). So, what happened in those 12 months? Why is the original such an outlier box office-wise?

I gotta say, I don't really understand the "rivalry" the internet seems to have between this movie and Oppenheimer lol. Seeing a lot of "Oppenheimer fans have been real quiet since the Barbie trailer dropped." Uh, sure? Didn't really think there were a lot of Oppenheimer 'fans' but what would they have to talk about? This reminds me of the Star Is Born vs Venom rivalry, where (a small internet minority, mind you) of Gaga fans seemed to be going after Venom when in reality, the two films couldn't be more different from each other, and both can co-exist just fine. One's a 3 hour World War 2-set drama, one's a colorful family/millenial comedy.

I don't think... anyone... would call the 90s Mario "groundbreaking" lol

Mario’s going nuts tonight. Evening sales are blowing matinees out of the water. This is going to be closer to Charlie’s 33.5M than EC’s 32.5M. Sales for Thursday pretty good too. And the weekend is nuts. Im thinking 160 or 170+ for the 5-day.

It’s not “young boys”. It’s men 18-40. Teenagers will go watch it ironically the way they watched Minions ironically.

Migration could hurt this.

Barbie to Millenials is what Minions 2 was to GenZ/GenAlpha. It'll have some family appeal, but this is going to be huge in the 18-40 demo.

Throwing my hat in the ring, Barbie is going to be a top 5 movie this summer. Hype online is through the roof. I think it’s doing LEGO movie numbers with a slightly bigger opening. 80/275 is where I’m at for now.

So when is the title going to change from "its-a-bad" to "its-a-hit" lmao.

Oh god don't even get me started on Detective Pikachu. I couldn't tell where the seriousness stopped and the trolling started, but I was 100% being gaslit by this forum for not thinking that Pikachu was going to have a 300M OW (OD?).

This is going to be a hit, Illumination's on a role. But yea, what the heck was up with that trailer with 1/2 of it being clips from other Illumination movies? I get they probably made it that way knowing that the majority of people who see it are going to be people seated in Super Mario Bros.

Likely the inflated budget comes from the fact that it was originally planned as a streaming release, so they had to pay out the actor's back-end deals upfront. Guessing this would have been a 50M movie had it been produced intended for a theatrical distribution.

Just for context, an interesting note from one of the bigger theater that I track (that has IMAX, DBOX, all sorts of PLF screens). Minions 2 opened to 3394 admissions over opening weekend (including Thursday, which since it was Canada day and shows started at 2PM essentially made it a 4-day weekend). Minions 1 opened to 4821 admissions. Mario is already at 1302 admissions presold going INTO Wednesday. For comparison, Air is at 16, and John Wick 4 was at 642 24 hours before first show.

I'm going to be completely honest. As a moviegoer (or if I was a child, or a parent with children), I couldn't care less what movie critics have to say about an Illumination-produced Super Mario Bros animated movie. If you're trying to gauge how people are going to respond to a movie like this, I think looking to critics is asking the wrong audience lol.

This is one example of a movie that is critic proof, at least on opening weekend. Honestly, could you imagine any parent having their kids beg them to see this for months, and then saying “no kids f*** you it has a “Rotten” on Rotten Tomatoes, looks like you’re staying home this weekend.”

Anecdotal but a famous tiktoker I’m friends with just called this a “cinematic masterpiece” on his social media’s. Although that may have been ironic

I'm honestly more excited for the new songs than I am for the old ones.

If this thing really does 25M on Wednesday I don’t see how it isn’t just massive throughout the weekend. 25 15 40 50 35 18