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The Super Mario Bros. Movie beat Barbie to be the most profitable film of 2023-GameCentral-Entertainment – Metro

Last year’s Mario Bros. movie made more money than Barbie and Oppenheimer, but what does that means for the upcoming Zelda film?

The Super Mario Bros. Movie – people were hooked on the brothers (Universal Pictures)

Last year’s Mario Bros. movie made more money than Barbie and Oppenheimer, but what does that means for the upcoming Zelda film?

Nintendo has just announced their latest financial results (and confirmation of their new console) and despite the Switch being in its twilight years they were surprisingly good, and now we know that that’s not just because of games and console sales.

It turns out that The Super Mario Bros. Movie was the most profitable film of last year and while Hollywood accounting means it’s hard to know exactly how much it made, estimates suggest it was £446 million.

It’s impossible to tell from that how much Nintendo alone made from the film, but they only paid £40 million in production costs, in a halfway split with Universal, so it’s fair to say they did well out of it all – especially when you start to add in all the promotional deals for merchandise and streaming.

Barbie may have been the biggest film of 2023, with a global box office of £1.15 billion, but it only just beat The Super Mario Bros. Movie on £1.09 billion (Oppenheimer was third on $776 million).

Revenues aren’t really what’s important though and some films are so expensive to make that even if they seem to be major successes, they don’t necessarily make any money. This has now become a familiar problem with video games, but movies are worse because the amount spent on marketing is often the same or more as the cost of making the film.

Nevertheless, according to Deadline, Barbie was still the second most profitable movie of the year, on £336 million, followed by Spider-Man: Across The Spider-Verse on £262 million, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem on £163 million, and Oppenheimer on £161 million.

Spider-Man was only the sixth biggest film of 2023 and Mutant Mayhem only the 34th, but animated movies are generally cheaper to make than big budget live action films and tend to make more in terms of merchandise sales – hence the higher profits.

Clearly this will have brought film companies running to Nintendo’s door, desperate to make more adaptations of their games, and already a live action Zelda film has been announced with Sony Pictures.

However, that will be a significantly bigger risk for Nintendo as not only is Zelda less well known (despite its prestige status, until Breath Of The Wild it was never a particularly big seller) but being live action will increase the budget and make it a lot harder to match the look and feel of the games.

Mario Bros. wasn’t a particularly good movie, but it did stick very close to the games in terms of visuals and characterisation. However, adapting a game franchise where the protagonist is mute and the heroine the series is named after rarely has any major role in the action is going to be a tough challenge.

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