The Super Mario Galaxy Movie has recorded the biggest opening day of the year at the U.S. box office and is set to become the highest-grossing Hollywood film of 2026 so far.
The animated sequel banked $48.3 million in the U.S. on Friday, and is on course to top $129 million domestically over its opening weekend.
The previous record for the year was held by the Ryan Gosling-led sci fi movie Project Hail Mary, which recorded a domestic opening weekend of $80.5 million.
Deadline reports that globally The Super Mario Galaxy Movie is expected to make a little over $370 million this weekend, which would make it the biggest Hollywood release of the year and second only to the Chinese racing comedy Pegasus 3, which currently leads the standings after banking $392M during its opening weekend.
The success of the second animated Super Mario film is not too much of a surprise given that the original movie was also a mammoth box office success in 2023. It made over a billion dollars to become the second biggest animated film of all time, behind only Frozen II.
The Super Mario Galaxy Movie sees the return of Mario (Chris Pratt), Princess Peach (Anya Taylor-Joy), Luigi (Charlie Day) and Yoshi (Donald Glover). They are joined by Glen Powell as Fox McCloud, Brie Larson as Princess Rosalina and Issa Rae as Honey Queen.
While fans have flocked to see the film,critics have been less impressed. The Independent’s Clarisse Loughrey wrote that the sequel “doubles down on its own blandness.”
“There’s barely a plot here,” she wrote. “Not a single memorable character. Not even another piano ditty for Jack Black to sing. It’s a series of large, vaguely connected explosions that Mario, his bro Luigi (Charlie Day), and his love interest Princess Peach (Anya Taylor-Joy) can land in front of in a superhero pose. Is it OK to ask why these sweet and goofy video game avatars are being treated as self-seriously as Marvel’s Avengers?”
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She continued: “You really get a sense in The Super Mario Galaxy Movie of how homogenous our sense of nostalgia has become, to the point that a generation of kids are being robbed of art that encourages curiosity and imagination, in order for adults to be reassured that the passions of their lost childhoods were very cool and very important. There is… one real, solid joke in this film? And it’s mostly just repeating a bit from Disney’s Zootopia.”
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