Walt Disney Co DIS CEO Bob Iger congratulated rival studio Universal Pictures — a division of Comcast Corporation CMCSA — for the success of "The Super Mario Bros. Movie," which smashed box office records since its release, earning over $1 billion globally.
Iger hailed the video game movie's achievements during a recent quarterly earnings call, stating that the success of the film was proof audiences were willing to pay for animated movies, according to Kotaku.
"Allow me to digress for a moment to congratulate Universal for the tremendous success of Super Mario Bros … It certainly proves people love to be entertained in theaters around the world, and it gives us reason to be optimistic about the movie business," Iger said.
"The Super Mario Bros. Movie" made waves in the film industry, earning an impressive $490 million in North America and an additional $532 million in international markets.
This latest achievement came just a month after the movie's highly successful opening weekend and it managed to maintain its position as the top film for four consecutive weekends.
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"The Super Mario Bros. Movie" became the 10th animated film in history to cross the $1 billion mark, after surpassing the $942.5 million grossed by 2019's "Minions: The Rise of the Gru."
The computer-animated adventure film produced by Nintendo ADR NTDOY and Illumination Entertainment, a subsidiary of Universal Pictures, also surpassed all other video game adaptations in global box office sales. It overtook movies such as "Pokemon Detective Pikachu" and "Warcraft," which grossed $433 million and $439 million, respectively.
This was a major achievement for the movie and the video game industry as a whole.
Recently, Mario creator Shigeru Miyamoto expressed his surprise and satisfaction with the film's success during a press conference in Japan and revealed he thought the poor reviews actually improved the film's performance, rather than holding it back.
"While many foreign critics have given the movie relatively low ratings, I think that also contributed to the movie’s notoriety and buzz," he said.
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