Were only, like, hours into the weekend at this point, but its already becoming clear that we might have a problem on our hands with this Mario guy. See, The Super Mario Bros. Movie isnt just doing well in its second week at the box office: Its doing improbably, unexpectedly, super well, with a projected drop-off of just 45 percent in domestic returns from last weekend. (By comparison, Avengers: Endgame dropped 58.7 percent from its first weekend to its second; these are very good retention numbers, is the point.) That includes a continual domination at the international box office, which, all told, means the Mario movie is expected to have made something like $659 million, planet-wide, by the time Monday rolls around. Watch
Which means we may be in horrible, terrifying reach of a world in which The Super Mario Bros. Movie makes more than a billion dollars, and, thus, ushers in a cinematic hell on earth the likes of which humanity has only rarely had to contemplate.
Basically, our worry hereand we admit that this is informed by a certain pessimism of the spirit, brought on by multiple decades of watching video game movies fail on pretty much every conceivable artistic levelis that if this damn thing breaks the billion-dollar mark, the deluge of gaming-flecked bullshit thats going to start spewing out of Hollywood is going to be truly unimaginable. TVs already primed the pump with The Last Of Us show, but if Mario breaks a billion, the next thing you know, theyre going to give Crash Bandicoot a movie. Do you want that, people? Do you want to hear Timothe Chalamets Crash Bandicoot voice? Because thats the reality were now careening toward. Spyro The Dragon. Banjo-Kazooie. Fuckin Bubsy. Were opening Pandoras Box here, and Aero The Acrobat is lurking at the bottom. Turn back, before all is lost.
Those last two paragraphs read like Penguinz0 satirizing a film critic, lmao.