Lily Kholar's blog : Mario Reaches $1B as Guardians of the Galaxy Turns In a Stellar Opening

Lily Kholar's blog

The 2023 Box Office is certainly off to a strong start- and it isn’t the movies which were expected to pull in the profit that are having their heyday, either. With the exceptional global performance of the Super Mario Bros movie finally catapulting it over the $1B mark, we have some exciting performance from Guardians of the Galaxy 3 too, despite its tricky position as a ‘threequel’, or trilogy-ender. Brandon Blake, our industry-expert entertainment lawyer from Blake & Wang P.A, dives into the facts and figures for us.

Solid Previews and Rising Sentiment

While the opening weekend total of $118.4 for Guardians of the Galaxy 3 poses no real challenge to the second installment, it still managed to beat all expectations and turn in the top performance of the Box Office weekend. It’s also showing very strong positive sentiment among audience-goers, a great predictor for a solid Box Office run. With 87% of the audience made up of ‘general’ theatergoers and only 13% of the under-12 family sector, the majority being boys, it’s an interesting audience makeup, too. Among the general crowd, we see 43% men over 25, and 21% women in the same demographic, for a total of 57% of the audience being between 18-34 years old. It has also performed surprisingly well in the Latino/Hispanic audience sector.

 

Interestingly, it wasn’t particularly hampered by its 2.5 hour runtime, either- something that was widely cited for the underperformance of Wakanda Forever.

Records for Chris Pratt and Super Mario Bros

It was certainly a great weekend for Chris Pratt at the Box Office, too. With the Super Mario Bros movie crossing the $500M North American threshold at the 31 day mark, a first for Nintendo, Illumination, and Universal, it’s also the second-fastest animated movie (behind  Incredibles 2, which hit the mark in 24 days) to do so. It’s also only the fourth movie of the pandemic era to cross that coveted $500M stateside mark, behind the ‘Holy Trinity’ of Spider-Man: No Way Home ($814.1M), Top Gun: Maverick ($718.7M) and Avatar: The Way of Water ($683.9M). Not a bad slate of films to be represented alongside!

 

As of last Sunday, it has also passed the $1B mark for global takings, making it the 10th movie in animated film history to do so. It’s the third Illumination movie to meet that benchmark. It opened in Japan this weekend, with a huge $14.3M start- their biggest opening weekend for an animation to date, as well as the biggest Universal Saturday in the country (knocking Jurassic World: Dominion down a spot) and the fastest Universal title to reach $1B yen. This also makes it the strongest opening weekend for Universal there to date. Perhaps most importantly, it’s also the first 2023 title and fifth of the pandemic era to reach the $1B threshold. Altogether, it’s now Universal’s 7th biggest movie ever.

All-in-all, this may well be one of the best Box Office weekends of the pandemic and post-pandemic era. Let’s hope we see the pattern repeated many more times throughout 2023!

 

 

 

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On: 2023-05-12 17:26:57.361 http://jobhop.co.uk/blog/17440/mario-reaches-1b-as-guardians-of-the-galaxy-turns-in-a-stellar-opening-

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