A portion of the once-dependable family audience has wandered, which has made movie theaters battle to recover from the epidemic. Family-friendly movies, mostly animated, made up 17% of global ticket sales in 2018, which is almost half of what they did in 2019.
But throughout the course of the weekend, Universal Pictures’ “The Super Mario Bros. Movie” amazed families by drawing large crowds of people. Since opening on Wednesday, the film has brought in an estimated $146.4 million from ticket sales at theaters across the US and Canada. Illumination Entertainment and Nintendo spent almost $100 million producing the PG-rated film.
An additional $173 million was made overseas for “Super Mario Bros. Movie,” which tells the story of Brooklyn plumbers who are zapped into the dangerous and magical Mushroom Kingdom. One Hollywood trade news site called the result “plumb insane,” pointing out that it was comparable to the earnings from Universal mega-franchises like “Fast and Furious” and “Jurassic World.”
Are family films making a comeback to the point that Hollywood can rely on them to some extent again?
Over the weekend, movie theater owners and studio executives were virtually performing cartwheels and exclaiming, “Yes!”
Jim Orr, head of domestic theatrical distribution at Universal, described the situation as “just extraordinary” on Sunday. As the weekend wore on, “the numbers just kept growing and growing.”
