Mario is about to become the first billion-dollar movie of 2023

A few weeks back, we wrote a piece on here noting that it seemed pretty likely—given the massive money-making trajectory of Nintendo, Illumination, and Universal’s The Super Mario Bros. Movie—that the film would likely end up making a billion dollars at the global box office at some point. This Newswire was criticized, in some quarters—and rightly, we admit now! Rightly!—for being a tad alarmist, in so far as we suggested, at the time, that the peculiar chemical changes that happens in movie studio executive’s brain when they see 9 zeroes after a 1 in a movie’s overall earnings might lead to an oncoming glut of animated video game-based cinematic offerings that might be, you know, apocalyptically bad. We’d now like to formally apolo—

Wait, hold on a second, we’re just getting some breaking news…

Jesus Christ, it’s happening: The fucking thing is breaking a billion. Grab your kids and protect your dogs, because we are now only seconds away from someone greenlighting an animated feature centered on Zero The Kamikaze Squirrel. It’s already happening, probably. These bastards have probably got Plok and Bonk on speed-dial. Blinx The Time Sweeper might be going into pre-production as we speak!

Which is to say that Variety reports today that the Mario movie is now on-track to crest that billion-dollar mark this Sunday, becoming only the 52nd movie in cinematic history to do so, and the first of 2023. (That makes it only the fourth of the COVID-19 era, after Spider-Man: No Way Home, Top Gun: Maverick, and Avatar: The Way Of Water. First one not to be a sequel, too, albeit a “not a sequel” with massively famous IP powering it.) As ever, Mario is being propelled along by a blend of strong domestic showings ($458 million in the U.S. and Canada) and a powerful international response that’s seen it do big numbers in the U.K., Mexico, and Germany. It’s not clear how long the run can continue, though; the film is about to hit its first really serious blockbuster competition next week, when Marvel releases Guardians Of The Galaxy Vol. 3, which might very well bring its meteoric, Bubsy-encouraging rise to a close.