With Tuesday’s grosses, Illumination/Nintendo/Universal’s The Super Mario Bros. Movie has crossed the $100M (13.74B yen) mark in Japan. In doing so, it becomes Universal’s top title ever there. In local currency, Mario overtakes Top Gun: Maverick as the No. 6 Hollywood film of all time in Japan, and is the No. 1 studio picture since the beginning of the pandemic.
Japan debuted Super Mario in late April with a huge $14.3M to score the biggest opening weekend ever for an animated studio movie, as well as the biggest Saturday box office in Universal history – topping Jurassic World Dominion. In only two days, Mario and Luigi led the fastest Universal film to reach 1B yen. That weekend’s result was Universal’s best ever start in the market.
The worldwide total is to date $1.357B. When excluding China, the total is $1.332B, just edging Frozen II outside that market. The international box office cume is $782.8M.
Globally, Super Mario remains the biggest film of the year, having scored the top opening of 2023 with $375.6M, which was also good for the biggest animated opening ever, the top Illumination debut and the best video game launch of all time. It’s Illumination’s highest-grossing movie ever, pushing the Chris Meledandri-led production house’s global box office across $9.4B.
It’s also the No. 3 Universal film ever worldwide and the top animated movie of all time in 15 markets including Mexico, France, Australia, the Netherlands, Central America, Colombia, Chile, Peru, Argentina, Ecuador, the UAE, Bolivia, Venezuela, Lebanon and Iceland.
Japan now leads all markets with $100.1M, followed by Mexico ($85.4M), the UK/Ireland ($67.7M), France ($62.4M) and Germany ($56.1M).
Directed by Aaron Horvath and Michael Jelenic from a screenplay by Matthew Fogel, Super Mario is produced by Illumination founder and CEO Meledandri and by Shigeru Miyamoto for Nintendo.