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