Super Mario Bros movie weekend opening

                            By Universal, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=68810546

The new Super Mario Bros movie released in the middle of this week to much anticipation. This represents a major effort by Nintendo expanding their most valuable IP into another medium. The last outing for Nintendo in 1993 led to a widely panned Super Mario Bros movie and supposedly scared them off movies for decades.

There is a major difference between the latest movie and the 1993 version, in that Nintendo was not involved in the 1993 movie. The current version involved Nintendo so much, that they appointed Chris Meledandri (the head of Illumination Studios) to their board of directors.

Nintendo has been notoriously conservative in expanding their IP outside of their games, so shareholders will be closely watching this. A failure might push Nintendo back into their shell once again. A success may mean more steps forward and probably more sources of revenue and exposure for the IP.

It is early days to guess how much the movie might earn but weekend projections so far are optimistic, roughly in the 80 to 100 million range, for US domestic. There is no confirmation of how much the movie costs, but it is rumoured to be 100 million. Applying a rule-of-thumb guideline, movies need to earn 2.5 times production cost to break even, because of marketing costs, movie theatres taking their cut and so on. This means the movie needs to earn roughly 250 million.

The critics reception was not so great, Metacritic score as of now is 47. This may seem alarming but given the projected figures for opening weekend, not so worrying. Another thing to note is that films similar to Super Mario had bad reviews but ended up as commercial successes. Here are some examples.

Sonic the Hedgehog (2020)

Metacritic: 47

Box office:

Domestic opening: 58 million

Total worldwide receipts: 319.7 million

Sonic the Hedgehog 2 (2022)

Metacritic: 47

Box Office:

Domestic opening: 72 million

Total worldwide receipts: 405.4 million

Minions The Rise of Gru (2022)

Metacritic: 56

Box Office:

Domestic opening: 107 million

Total worldwide receipts: 939.6 million

While we wait for new data to show up, I am cautiously optimistic about the movie's performance. It will be very useful to observe Nintendo's reaction to the results (once they are in) and their view on their IP strategy going forwards.

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