The Super Mario Bros Movie: brand power is as important as ever

Come on, let’s be honest about all this: most of us expected an animated film based on Nintendo’s famous characters to do well, sure, but… that well? It feels surreal to even type it: Illumination/Universal’s The Super Mario Bros Movie is about to hit $1 billion at the global box office in less than a month (not even having opened to all markets yet!), breaking records left and right in the process.

What’s more, it doesn’t seem like it’s running out of steam anytime soon — quite the opposite, in fact, as there are no other major animated film releases on the horizon to contest with and word of mouth appears to be helping it greatly. If The Super Mario Bros Movie ends up having the legs it currently seems it does, it could be the first animated movie ever to enter the all-time Top Ten of box office megahits (unless one considers 2019’s The Lion King to be an animated film… which it artistically isn’t).

Anyhow, you get the point: The Super Mario Bros Movie is currently killing it.

It’s yet another example of how much weight brand power still carries in this post-COVID, modernized, globalized show business. But the film itself is actually good, which is not just helpful, but rather necessary. Some of Nintendo’s characters — intellectual property of immeasurable value, built over decades of video games — may be as recognizable as Marvel comic heroes or Disney cartoons, but they cannot guarantee commercial success all on their own. The spectacular flop that was 1993’s Super Mario Bros — a darker, live-action take on the famous duo of Italian plumbers — is proof of that, not even managing to make its money back ($38.9 million at the box office out of a $48 million budget).

So the film has to be good and market conditions have to be favorable for something like the perfect storm of The Super Mario Bros Movie to actually happen at the box office.

The home entertainment sector, though, is a different story: one needs only take a look at the Top Ten movies adapted from video games at JustWatch — the film and TV shows recommendation service focused on streaming — to realize this. Quality might be all over the place and market conditions may play no role or even be unfavorable… but people are still quite interested in these movies simply because they are already invested in the video games the former are based on. It’s the very reason that Hollywood studios are always coming back to gaming intellectual properties as a source of material likely to succeed, after all.

While we gamers would like nothing more than to watch our favorite video games finally (finally!) getting the attention they deserve as source material for huge entertainment brands, the success of The Super Mario Bros Movie in April and HBO’s The Last of Us in February is — sadly — not indicative of anything concrete when it comes to such adaptations. As a matter of fact, these productions may be perceived as a stark reminder of how many other films and TV shows have failed to impress critics and consumers alike. By taking a look at the Top Ten TV shows attracting the most interest over at JustWatch, for instance, this becomes abundantly clear: Arcane and The Last of Us — both masterpieces of animation and live action respectively — lead the pack, while all other productions in that chart are good, but nowhere near as artistically accomplished, well-written or well-executed.

Taking a look at what’s on schedule for fans of video game adaptations is also putting things into perspective: they are not that many and, for the most part, not likely to reach The Super Mario Bros Movie and The Last of Us levels of success. There’s Netflix’s third season of The Witcher and Peacock’s Twisted Metal TV show streaming in July, there’s Sony’s Gran Turismo movie coming out in August and… not much else that’s confirmed for 2023. Even looking at 2024’s slate, Sonic the Hedgehog 3 is coming to theaters and the second season of Halo is coming to Paramount Plus but, other than that, all we have to go on is just a lot of announcements.

So before getting ahead of ourselves with the whole “game adaptations are having a moment!” thing — which mainstream media seem to think is happening right now — maybe we should take a breather, take a good look around and just enjoy the handful of exceptional game adaptations available to us right now. It may be a while before we get more of those.