By: Joseph Nelson

Critics were very hesitant when it came to test screening for the new Mario movie that would hit theaters soon, giving it only a 54% Rotten Tomatoes score before the premiere ,which led to many moviegoers being cautious when buying tickets to see their favorite plumber characters. Little did the critics know how wrong they would be…

The film “Super Mario Bros” is an animated film based off of the 90’s game ‘Super Mario 64’ and its adaptations afterwards so many early Gen Z babies and late Millennials were very excited to finally see their favorite plumbers on the big screen. This showed with the first weekend of the movie being out with the movie making $377 million in the box offices world wide. To put into perspective, ‘Frozen 2’ made $358 million in its first weekend, the movie sequel that followed up from the song (“Let It Go”) that many kids sang for months after release.

Many were surprised by the statistics of moviegoers with 45% of the audience being from the ages of 18-34, which to many was a total shock, but to the people who know about the games and their community, they really didn’t bat an eye.

Many also came to see their favorite A-list actors in an animated movie, as this film hosted some of the biggest actors on the scene with Chris Pratt as Mario, Charlie Day as Luigi, Jack Black as Bowser, Keegan-Micheal Key as Toad, Seth Rogen as Donkey Kong, and Anya Taylor-Joy as Peach. The production did not waste any money on the casting which turned out to work great. Even after many concerns about the casting, many were pleasantly surprised by how well the actors played their roles.

Two weeks have passed now, and ‘Super Mario Bros’ have now passed as the leading movie in the box offices with many viewers going twice to see the brothers again. In fact, the movie only dropped 41% in sales after its record breaking weekend, which for many critics is unheard of as usually movies drop down on average 60% of its first opening week. I like to think that this goes to show that even critics can be surprised by the success of what many were to believe as a flop of a movie.