“The Super Mario Bros. Movie” promises to put Universal on the animation throne long occupied by Disney. It also shows that video games, not comic books, are where Hollywood should be sniffing around for new franchises.
With a comparatively modest $100 million budget, Universal and Illumination’s video game adaptation shattered box office records for animated movies, earning $204 million domestically and $376 million worldwide over the long Easter weekend. But the movie also set a record for box office derived from a character that audiences likely first encountered in an arcade or on a console.
“I think we are going to see a lot more video games being made into movies,” Gerber Kawasaki CEO Ross Gerber told TheWrap.