There was never a doubt that The Super Mario Galaxy Movie was going to be a huge hit. Its predecessor, The Super Mario Bros. Movie, made well over $1 billion in 2023, and Illumination quickly got to work on a sequel. That sequel, which is now in theaters, is currently on pace to have a bigger opening than the previous movie, and that makes us very sad.
Now, it’s not all bad. Anytime people pay to go to the movies, it’s good for the movie industry at large, which in turn lets more people make more movies. However, in this case, we’re sad because The Super Mario Galaxy Movie is experiencing its success by being even less interesting than its predecessor (which is saying a lot), and it gives Illumination zero incentive to try harder to make something better in the future.
To explain, Deadline reports that The Super Mario Galaxy Movie, after just one day, grossed about $68 million globally, which is up from the first film, which did about $66 million in a day. Basically, inflation aside, Illumination and its partner Universal are likely to make more on the sequel than on the original. And considering most critics, myself included, didn’t think the film was very good, why would they try to make the next film better?
All Illumination learns from these numbers is that if they do the same thing over and over, people will not just show up; they’ll show up more. There’s no need to try to craft a good story. All they need to do is have the characters run and jump around, throw in a few cameos, and play the music from the games. Why would you work hard to craft an interesting story that evokes human emotions if most audiences don’t care? In theory, those are things that would make these movies better and draw in even bigger audiences. But, in practice, we have concrete proof that is not the case.
The company has yet to announce a third Mario movie, but we’d imagine that’ll happen before the end of the month. And now we can all but assure ourselves that the following film, and the films after that, will just be more of the same. Which some people like. But we wish there were a higher standard.
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