They always said that plumbing was a reliable trade.
A new movie character is crossing the threshold and joining the billion dollar club, and he says, “It’s a-me, Mario!” Universal Pictures’s The Super Mario Bros. Movie, produced in conjunction with animation studio Illumination and video game stalwarts Nintendo, will officially raise the flag (or rescue the princess, or gain mushroom power, or whichever Mario-related metaphor you like) sometime this weekend, as per The Hollywood Reporter. Who knows, if you get in the car right now and drive to the local multiplex and buy a ticket, it could be you that puts the mustachioed computer-generated li’l adventurer over the top!
If the line is crossed on Sunday, as anticipated, it will be after just 26 days in release. It will be the 10th animated movie to have accrued this much coin, and the 52nd film to enter this exclusive group.
The most recent title to hit the billion-dollar mark was Avatar: The Way of Water, which is still out there scooping up cash in its net. It grossed over $800,000 domestically last week, its 19th week of release. That’s almost twice as much as Kelly Reichardt’s Showing Up made in total over its first three weeks, and Showing Up is a masterpiece. Yes, yes, apples and oranges, but sometimes the differentials are extraordinary.
Since we’re snooping around the billionaires club, let’s see what else we can learn. According to Rotten Tomatoes’ binary metric, the most popular film with critics in this elite circle is actually a tie between Toy Story 3 and Zootopia, which both have a 98 percent approval rating. Toy Story 4 is right on its heels for the bronze medal at 97 percent. Tom Cruise, Daniel Radcliffe, and Chadwick Boseman represent the highest-rated non-animated entries, with Top Gun: Maverick, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part Two, and Black Panther all tied at 96 percent.
The lowest-rated five titles? Yeah, let’s do that—with all this dough, they can take the heat. Star Wars: Episode I—The Phantom Menace, a controversial picture, to say the least, has a 51 percent approval rating. Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom (a movie I kinda liked, actually) has 47 percent, Transformers: Dark of the Moon has 35 percent, Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides has 33 percent, and Jurassic World: Dominion has 29 percent. The cellar dweller, and deservedly so, is Transformers: Age of Extinction, with an abysmal 17 percent. It is also the only film in history to make a billion dollars and also includes a factually inaccurate statutory rape joke.
All the movies in the billionaires club are what we’d call “Hollywood productions” (through some, like Skyfall, are not American) but this cultural hegemony will not last forever. Chinese productions, which have only minimal releases in the United States, are getting very close to the magic number. The Battle of Lake Changjin, an intense war epic boasting three directors, topped out at $909 million. It also would have been the number one movie worldwide in 2021 had it not been for Spider-Man: No Way Home, a film that, coincidentally or maybe not coincidentally, was denied exhibition in China.
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